Owner’s feud with Four Seasons leaves Midtown hotel in limbo

By abbasanwarinfo Last updated Oct 3, 2022

The owner of a Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan won’t back down in a rumored dispute with the hotel chain, so the famous Midtown hotel is still closed.

People who know about the situation told the New York Post that the fight between Ty Warner and the brand could keep the hotel at 57 East 57th Street closed for years. The hotel had said before that it wanted to reopen in the spring of 2022, but its website says that infrastructure and maintenance work could take “well into” the year, which is almost over.

The street-level windows of the property are covered with brown paper, and the owner of a nearby restaurant told the outlet that he hadn’t seen any signs of construction work at the property.

The Four Seasons is expensive to keep up. Warner, a billionaire from Chicago who made the famous toy brand Beanie Babies, is said to have been unhappy with the hotel’s operating costs and the fact that it lost money, even in the years before the pandemic wiped out the city’s hotel business. The hotel chain, on the other hand, isn’t very interested in changing its prices to make the hotel more profitable.

Experts in the field told the Post that it’s the kind of fight that could go on for years. The two sides have been talking quietly for 18 months, but they haven’t made much progress.

A representative of the hotel workers’ union told the Post in November that preparations were being made to reopen the 57 East 57th Street property in the spring, even though the dispute was making things look bad.

On another issue at the hotel, between the employees and the people who run and manage the property, the feuding parties are on the same side. In August, a proposed class-action lawsuit said that the hotel’s reopening was being held up to avoid paying out millions of dollars in unpaid wages and severance.

Warner, a reclusive billionaire who made a famous line of toys, bought the hotel for $275 million in 1999, seven years after it opened. The cost of building the hotel was $475 million.

The Four Seasons doesn’t own any of the properties in its portfolio. Instead, it runs the hotels on behalf of its owners. That leaves the company open to fights when the two sides don’t agree.

READ MORE ARTICLES;