The two hoteliers took the stage like ol’ pals—and hey, fun fact: both Schrager and Tisch were alumni of the 92nd Street Y nursery school. Who knew? The discussion was formatted as a Q&A, with Tisch lobbing the questions to Schrager. While we knew this was going to be a primarily Schrager-focused talk, we’d have loved to hear a bit more from Tisch, frankly—he seemed like he had a great speaking presence and an awesome sense of humor. We dug him. Nonetheless, Schrager was about as suave, cool and collected as we’d expected him to be…
The first 30 minutes of the talk were pretty much fun background facts about the night club pioneer-turned “father of the boutique hotel”: he originally came from Brooklyn (East Flatbush, to be exact) and has mad love for the borough—though we couldn’t help but wonder why he hasn’t ventured into the BK to add to the growing population of cool, hip hotels there. From the BK, he hit up Syracuse University—of which he speaks very fondly—where he met Steve Rubell, who later became his partner in a little nightclub venture called Studio 54 (perhaps you’ve heard of it?)
The discussion eventually led to how Schrager’s career made a progression from the nightclub biz to hotels because “nightclubs had no discernable product; it was about creating some sort of mystique, some sort of magic,” as he describes it—and he wanted to do something different in an industry full of big-box chains “dominated by the efficiencies of execution.” Interestingly, when asked about why he chose the boutique route instead of rolling out a chain of Mondrians or Delanos, his answer was simple: “I knew we were doing something distinctive. If i wanted to do a chain, there would be 100 of them by now. But I like to do something and then move on.”
Jenna Bromberg of HotelChatter.com attended last night’s talk “The Future of Lifestyle and Business” with two of the biggest names in the hotel biz, Ian Schrager and Jonathan Tisch (pictured, left to right). She reports:
