Round Table, Meet the Desktop; At the Algonquin Hotel, Tradition Is Getting an Upgrade

Can you perform cosmetic surgery on an adored 100-year-old and still keep her recognizable to the loved ones?

The grande dame in question is the venerable Algonquin Hotel, the neo-Renaissance literary landmark and sometime intellectual oasis that was haven to the witerati of the fabled Round Table.

The new owners of the hotel, which turns 100 on Friday, are sprucing up for the centennial. The transformation goes beyond the new six-foot-wide oil painting of the Round Table acolytes, which was installed in the lobby restaurant last Friday (replacing a smaller 1998 painting removed by the previous owners).

Also on Friday, each of the 174 guest rooms in the hotel, at 59 West 44th Street, got its own high-speed T1 Internet connection, in this timeless domain where the Royal typewriter once held sway.

Its owner of six months, Miller Global Properties, has entrusted the Algonquin's fate to Destination Hotels and Resorts of Denver, which has a national roster of 24 resorts and hotels catering to the wealthy.

The management company is the newest guardian of The Tradition at the Algonquin -- once affectionately called the Gonk by 1930's regulars (as in ''Hey, kids, let's crawl over to the Gonk''). Until extensive renovations in 1991 and 1998, change intruded but glacially upon The Tradition. A Paleolithic front-desk index-card reservation system held sway until 1989, and elevator operators kept cranking open the doors until the early 1990's. Its older habitués liked it that way.

Kenneth J. Widmaier, the hotel's interim managing director, said the Algonquin ''is a historic asset in a great location.''

So far, the new management seems willing to embrace the hotel's quirky legacy, but is pressing a program of tech tweaking. For example, last week the hotel installed a cutting-edge computerized check-in database that instantly retrieves the personal preferences of arriving guests.

The Algonquin is pushing to reposition itself for more conference business in its 4,000-square-foot, second-floor meeting-room space, and is ready to offer up the Oak Room -- onetime home of the power lunch -- to the PowerPoint gods when the room is not being used for cabaret.

The hotel will be trolling for more female travelers (who say in focus groups that they like the comfy lobby and the safety of the closely watched, one-door entrance). And it will be offering packages inviting people to stay overnight in the hotel for cabaret evenings.

A pricey room refurbishing is scheduled to begin next summer, but for now, there are no plans to install a celebrity chef in the Algonquin's 80-seat lobby restaurant. However, managers are considering a return to the homey fare that, The Tradition holds, was enjoyed by Round Tablers, including chicken potpies, popovers and apple pancakes.

Algonquin guests once included Brendan Behan, Irving Berlin, Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, William Faulkner, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Laughton, Thurgood Marshall and Laurence Olivier. More recent arrivals have included Maya Angelou, Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Irons, Angela Lansbury, Tom Stoppard, Vanessa Redgrave and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The hotel famously cosseted such mandarins as the New Yorker editor William Shawn, who ate English muffins or cornflakes for lunch most weekdays at his pink banquette in the Rose Room (called the Round Table Room these days).

There, in the 1920's and 1930's, the nimbler-than-thou set traded remarkably clever quips and wisecracks while downing remarkably clever quantities of contraband from ingeniously hidden silver flasks during deepest Prohibition.

The roll call of kibitzers counted George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun and even Harpo Marx. Its so-called Ladies Annex included Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker and Beatrice Kaufman.

Sean Hennessey, director of the hotel consulting business of PricewaterhouseCoopers, who was not involved in the Algonquin sale, said that the heritage of the hotel -- which is a landmark without and within -- ''plays well to the tourist trade.'' But, he noted, ''the Algonquin has to move well beyond the Round Table to resonate with a broad segment of commercial travelers.''

According to analysts and published reports, the hotel was on the block for $50 million before the World Trade Center attack, but sold for about $40 million.

Mr. Hennessey also noted that the hotel is competing in an increasingly crowded market including ''the renovated and new properties on its own block.'' That thoroughfare is club row, on West 44th between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas (the Harvard, the New York Yacht, the Penn), and now hotel alley (the City Club, the Iroquois, the Royalton, the Mansfield and the Sofitel).

The Algonquin charges $199 to $289 a night for rooms, and $349 to $439 for one of the hotel's 24 suites -- rates that ''are fairly attractive,'' Mr. Hennessey said, compared with other hotels in the area. The Algonquin's current occupancy rate, 80 percent, is a bit higher than the 74 percent New York average estimated this year by Mr. Hennessey.

The hotel's senior staff departed after the regime change last June. Geoffrey A. Mills, the former general manager, said he and his executive team were offered jobs but turned them down because of diminished severance guarantees and the elimination of an income-enhancing incentive plan. ''I think the company wanted to bring in its own culture,'' said Mr. Mills, now managing director of the Melrose Hotel in Manhattan.

After the departure of Mr. Mills and his team, some regular guests migrated to the Iroquois Hotel, a perennial Algonquin rival. But many loyally cherish their connection with The Tradition.

Emerging from the elevator on a recent afternoon was the novelist Reynolds Price, who has visited the hotel for the last 40 years, he said, ever since Eudora Welty ''introduced me to the place when I told her I needed a good New York hotel.'' Mr. Price smiled at the bell captain, Mike Lyons. ''Mike and I are almost the two oldest living inhabitants,'' Mr. Price said.

Mr. Lyons, 59, has cosseted three generations of guests. He has vivid memories of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dining with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Dr. Robert Oppenheimer puffing his pipe en route to the elevators.

The stubborn loyalty of the hotel's regulars has, at times, paid extraordinary dividends. ''I believe I survived 9/ll thanks to the Algonquin,'' said Stephen A. Gazillo, a vice president at Washington Group International, an engineering company that had offices on the 91st floor of 2 World Trade Center.

The night before Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Gazillo, who lives in Massachusetts, decided to stay at the Algonquin, a favorite since his first visit a decade ago.

He left the Algonquin for his office at 8:10 a.m. and emerged from the subway just as the first hijacked plane hit the north tower. ''If I had stayed downtown at the Millenium with my colleagues, and left that hotel at the same time, I'd have been in the office,'' he said. Thirteen of his co-workers died.

But many repeat guests stay due to the ambience. Christina Zeniou, the hotel's new marketing director, stood beside Mr. Lyons on a recent afternoon and invoked The Tradition as she noted the cozy stained-oak lobby with its heirloom brass ''Proper Attire Required'' plaque and shamelessly spoiled Matilda, the lobby cat. ''Look at this,'' she said, ''it's like stepping into a parlor.''

But sharp-eyed Algonquin devotees forever regret the changes. ''Why did you turn the Blue Bar into a coat closet?'' asked Susan Jasper, a book publisher from Toronto.

Ms. Zeniou explained that the shot-glass-size former bar had been moved to a grander, more accommodating 54-seat space in the hotel's former carriage house at the west side of the lobby, to make room for a much-needed cloakroom and a suitable abode for the goddess Matilda.

''Well, thank God you didn't move the bells off the tables,'' Ms. Jasper said, indicating the classic brass lobby bells, for summoning waiters to bring another round.

Sadly, in 2002, the bells must be bolted to the tables to thwart thieves.