Algonquin Hotel’s Grammar Needs a Lift

The new owners of the Algonquin Hotel spent two years and $20 million fixing up the literary hangout’s bathrooms, bedrooms and lobby. But they neglected to polish some atrocious grammar, spelling and punctuation.

The hotel’s service directory, which awaits guests in their rooms, contains a virtually unreadable essay on the Algonquin’s piquant history. Subjects lack predicates, modifiers are misplaced, articles simply disappear. Semicolons impersonate colons; colons materialize inexplicably in mid-clause.

“It’s an atrocity,” says Christopher Hitchens, a journalist who stayed at the hotel this summer. The profile, he argues, undermines the tradition on which the Algonquin tries to trade.

In the 1920s, the Round Table in the hotel’s Rose Room was the site of luncheon gatherings of some of the city’s sharpest wits, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman. The group’s sparkling--and often vicious--repartee became legend. The hotel has been a rendezvous for literary and theatrical figures ever since.

A Brazilian subsidiary of a Japanese corporation bought the hotel in 1987, the year in which the Algonquin was declared a city landmark. Good English, however, is harder to preserve than good architecture; the introductory essay sounds more like something from a pool table than the Round Table.

How’s this for openers? “The facade and Edwardian interior have changed little; including the single manually operated elevator, the television sets that are hidden inside wooden cabinets, and of course, the hotel’s famous lobby with it’s lovely, dark oak columns of trim, wing chairs and chinoiseries.”

The profile calls the Round Table “notorious” when it means “famous” and says the Algonquin originally “was surrounded by stables and the tallest building on the block.” What the author meant was that the 12-story hotel WAS the tallest building on that block of West 44th Street.

The names of Alexander Woollcott, Tallulah Bankhead and Yves Montand are misspelled. Simone de Beauvoir’s name becomes “de Feauvoir.”

Many sentences read like clumsy translations, as in: “The Algonquin has withstood World War II, the Depression, and even during prohibition times, when drinking was prohibited, the indulgent frantic behavior of the times flourished.”

Another sentence notes that the original owner “even gave a house suite for the Round Table to play poker on Saturdays, which became a ‘salon’ for people in media and arts.”

The essay also is marred by run-on sentences (including one breathtaking 61-word marathon); redundancy (Harpo Marx and the Marx Brothers both appear on a list of famous guests); and faulty punctuation (including a misplaced comma that makes it seem that gambler Diamond Jim Brady was a theater critic for The New York Times).

The hotel’s profile reports that the wife of a former owner “introduced Thorton (sic) Wilder to William Faulkner in the elevator, and James Dean used to eat there when he started out.”

“I did not try eating in the elevator,” Hitchens wrote in his column in The Nation, “keen as I am to be mistaken for James Dean.”

Christina Zeniou, the hotel’s spokeswoman, conceded that the essay is riddled with mistakes, and said it would be changed. “I’m not sure who wrote it or where it came from,” she said. “It just slipped by.”