One of the old rooms in the Barbizon, and the exterior circa 2007
The Barbizon Hotel for Women, currently known as Barbizon 63, was known for giving women a safe (and chaste!) retreat right in the big, bad Big Apple (at 140 East 63rd Street, to be exact). The building was constructed in 1927, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, and now word comes out that it may be given landmark status.
During its glory years—when everyone from Grace Kelly to Ali MacGraw to Joan Didion to Edith Bouvier Beale to Sylvia Plath to Liza Minnelli lived there—there were strict dress codes, no men allowed above the ground floor, and according to Vanity Fair "electrical appliances were banned." (These days Ricky Gervais lives there.) This didn't change until around 1981, and in 2005 the hotel closed and was remade in its current condo incarnation—though there are still allegedly "13 women living under the old arrangements at the hotel due to rent control."
As DNAInfo reports, "Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts wants the city to declare the Barbizon a landmark, encouraging the building's fans to speak in support of it at a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on July 26." Until then...
