Last year, when Elisabetta Fabri, president of the Italy's StarHotels International, was shopping around for a New York hotel, she found her way to the 178-room Parc Fifty-One, on 51st Street at Seventh Avenue.
She liked its 55-gallon bathtubs, its 52 suites, its marble-floored lobby and its elegant ground floor Italian restaurant, Harry Cipriani's Bellini. Last week, the Parc Fifty-One became the first hotel in the United States for her family's group of 14. The price was $42 million and it is now The Michelangelo. Rooms rents begin at $240 a night.
Crystal chandeliers, some furniture and brass elevator doors survive the hotel's more modest time when it was the tourist-class Taft, with 1,750 rooms and a corridor leading into the 6,200-seat Roxy movie-palace. It had opened as the Hotel Manger in 1926, and was renamed for President William Howard Taft in 1931.It was closed in the early 80's, and reopened in 1988 with the Grand Bay Hotel on the first seven floors, 443 condominiums from the 8th to 21st floors and retail space. In 1990, Park Lane International bought it and renamed it Parc Fifty-One.
