Condos at the Plaza? Oh my Lord, Eloise

“There are absolutely nothing but rooms in the Plaza,” says Eloise.

And now they’re all empty. Eloise, her cheeky self captured in a portrait that has hung forever with other paintings in the lobby, now hangs alone. Even the Long Island businessman who threatened to chain himself to the Oak Bar has vacated.

Only bundles of unread newspapers that didn’t know well enough not to be delivered anymore carpeted the entrance on Fifth Avenue last week while inside a few Vogue models lolled about for a last fashion shoot in the Palm Court.

The legendary hotel, built 98 years ago, is temporarily closed. After a protracted public relations battle over what it should be when it reopens, the owner shut it down for two years while it’s reinvented as some combination of hotel and condominium.

How this came to pass is a portrait of a classic New York conflict: cash versus character.

The owner, Elad Properties, an Israeli development company, bought the chateau-esque hotel last year to turn it into flashy, upscale condos with a flashy, upscale indoor mall.

The hotel workers union -- yanking the heartstrings of anyone who has ever fallen in love over drinks in the Oak Bar or taken an overdressed little girl to tea in the Palm Court -- wanted to keep what has been the setting of such movies as “The Way We Were” just the way it was.

Naturally, the powerful union, which spent $2 million on a “Save the Plaza” campaign, wanted to save its members’ jobs. Everyone else who attended rallies or bloviated in print about their youthful romps in oversized Plaza suites, wanted to fret over the loss of yet another grand New York personality.

“This was a very David and Goliath kind of story,” says Rose Ganguzza, who once ran the hotel’s media department and put together a celebrity coalition to fight the conversion.

“There was nothing by law that could be done, but yet the emotional pressure ... was so great, the other side had to come to the table.”

The fight got ugly this winter, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is up for re-election and needs union support, intervened.

Then, Ronald S. Lauder (scion of the cosmetics family and chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art) got involved for no apparent reason except to act as a good fairy: At one point he flew to Israel to negotiate rich guy to rich guy with the owners. Even Jesse Jackson turned up at a pro-union rally.

Finally, a compromise was struck last month, although there was blood on the floor, not to mention rivers of gooey sentiment and bruises from all the hardball politics.

Sorting it out, it’s still hard to determine the winner: cash or character. Instead of 805 hotel rooms, there will be 348 (up from Elad’s 150), mostly facing the dumpsters on 58th Street, although a few will face Fifth Avenue. All of the 200 (down from Elad’s original 250) new condominium units will have views of Central Park. Of the 864 hotel workers, about one-third will keep their jobs, according to the union.

Instead of cutting an escalator into the floor to build a mall in the Terrace Room and walling off the balconies in the Grand Ballroom -- part of the original remodeling plan -- it all will remain intact. An indoor mall, however, will be developed in the basement and sub-basements now used for storage, according to Steve Solomon, a spokesman for the owners.

Solomon insisted that all along Elad had planned to spruce up the memorable spots such as the Edwardian and Oak rooms on the first floor, which like most of the hotel had become shabby in recent years.

Despite a headline-hogging four months over whither-the-Plaza, tension about the reinvention of the old is nothing new. In fact, it’s a constant in New York. Right now the value of real estate here is so outsized that just running a traditional business -- like a well-appointed hotel or an insurance company -- doesn’t make sense anymore.

So developers are gobbling up venerable old buildings like the Plaza and converting part of the interiors into condos, thus cashing out on the value of the property while preserving not the use, but at least the character and the brand.

Condos are particularly popular with the newly moneyed class in Manhattan and with flush buyers from overseas because unlike nosy co-ops that demand to see your mom’s will, your husband’s 401K and five years of bank statements, all condos require is cash and more cash.

In fact, you can’t pick up the real estate section in New York without reading about another iconic building going condo. The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission is around to make sure the facades of these architectural treasures are preserved. (The Plaza’s exterior was designated a landmark in 1969.) But interiors get gutted every day it seems.

“New York re-creates itself not in every generation but in every year,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant and local wise man who acted as spokesman for Lauder during the Plaza episode. “The character of buildings and the character of humans have less value than the property and the cash involved.”

Is that a good thing or bad?

“It depends,” says Sheinkopf. “The cry is always modernize, modernize, but modernization meant the loss of the Metropolitan Opera House and the old Penn Station. Modernization means we lose a lot, the soul of the things that are important to us.”

Just last month, the fabulous Metropolitan Life Insurance building, apparently one of the best-preserved examples of 19th century skyscraper architecture, sold for almost $1 billion. Its gold-leafed, 41-story tower, built two years before the Plaza, will be recast as ... condos. The list goes on: The mammoth, stone-faced former Apple Bank building on the Upper West Side is going condo; so are the St. Regis and Gramercy Park hotels.

Still, remarketing a personality doesn’t have to be fatal. Even a little vixen like Eloise, the fictional equivalent to a great, old New York building, has to be reinvented it seems to stay fresh and alive and profitable (“Oh my Lord. There’s so much to do,” as Eloise says).

During the next two years she’ll be a busy, busy girl, that pixie who turns 6 this November -- for the 50th time since she was created by author Kay Thompson. The owners of the Plaza have vowed to safeguard Eloise’s portrait during construction, and at some point she’s likely to turn up in the sales office for the condos. (“Oh my Lord. Tacky, tacky,” Eloise would probably say.)

As for her literary self, well, Eloise is finally, finally, going to Hollywood, probably because there are a lot more plot lines there.

Hilary Knight, who created the drawings for the original book and the portrait, is at work on “Eloise in Hollywood.” It’s about time that East Coast girl got a taste of the West!

As for her character, there’s talk of a Broadway play. And the Eloise that has twice turned up in movies is taking a sojourn to (where else?) Paris. A movie is in the works.

But if Carrie Bradshaw of “Sex and the City” is any example, Paris defections don’t last long. Eloise will find her way home. All classy New York women do.