URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1027 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 11, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

A 19th-Century Turn
BYLINE: By GEOFFREY WOLFF.

Geoffrey Wolff, a novelist and biographer, is the Berthold Leibinger fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

SECTION: Section 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1273 words
HEYDAY

By Kurt

Andersen.

622 pp.

Random House. $26.95.

It perhaps strikes anyone who has read an ambitious historical novel -- and certainly strikes anyone who has had the audacity to try to write one -- that the enterprise represents the triumph of hope over experience, a suspension of hard-won, armoring caution, a Peter-Pannish faith in ... well, faith. How daunting it must be to get it right: facts and artifacts, syntax and slang, costumes and customs, fads and prices, conventional wisdoms and bright ideas. And if such a novel were to aspire to be a bulging monster, teeming with extravagantly vivid characters going about their coincidentally intersecting lives with amplified voices, wearing garish clothes, committing melodramatic vices, loving (and hating) with the fervor of char-

acters from a comic opera, then such fiction would seem perfectly ill-suited to a writer and observer known heretofore as the wised-up, sardonic, founding co-editor of the late Spy magazine. As a columnist (for New York magazine) and a radio commentator, Kurt Andersen should react to the emotions described by gee whiz like a fox to a bunny wabbit.

Andersen's previous novel -- ''Turn of the Century'' (1999) -- is, like ''Heyday,'' lengthy and episodic, but it owes its flensing spirit to the examples of Tom Wolfe's ''Bonfire of the Vanities'' and ''The Way We Live Now,'' by Anthony Trollope It keeps a sharp eye focused on hypocrisy, self-interest, preening, sharp practice and overreaching.

''Heyday,'' by contrast, cries huzzah for over-the-top ambition. It's a band-concert of a novel, a parade in honor of overreaching. Set in 1848 -- that hugely eventful year in Europe, the pre-Civil War United States, Mexico and the California gold fields -- it never quits exclaiming, Gosh! How about that! Who'd a thunk it? It's a mighty busy and messy story, jumping among the urban settings of Gotham, Paris, London, Chicago and San Francisco; evil is afoot and brutality the quotidian, but ''Heyday'' is also a sweet book, with a tropism toward redemption and happy endings.

The protagonist, connected to every subordinate character by sometimes flimsy networks of chance, is Benjamin Knowles, younger son of a newly rich Lancashire mill owner and entrepreneur. During his visit to a friend in Paris during the 1848 uprising that brought down the July Monarchy, the friend is believed to have been killed, and Benjamin is inadvertently an accomplice to the death of a militiaman. A principal weapon used during the mortal mayhem is the beak of a stuffed penguin, which suggests why at least one advance review of ''Heyday'' has described the novel as a ''parody'' of Victorian melodrama.

It is in fact an homage to Dickens, Dumas and Hugo, reviving as a central plot device the relentless quest of Inspector Javert, in ''Les Miserables,'' for the hide of Jean Valjean. Benjamin is hunted throughout ''Heyday'' by the elder brother of the slain militiaman, Drumont, a Corsican rumored to be the bastard son of Napoleon by his prostitute mother. Prostitution -- in New York and San Francisco -- provides a wealth of material and moral calculus for Andersen's characters, the most successful of whom is Polly Lucking, a social-climbing nascent feminist, part-time unsuccessful actress and part-time wildly successful hooker in a New York brothel.

Benjamin, fleeing from Paris to England, and from England sailing to New York to seek adventure and fortune in the New World -- looking for a ''permanent place to live in a more suitably ... American way. Whatever that meant'' -- meets Polly (unprofessionally) and falls in love. This brings him together with Polly's brother, Duff, a survivor of the Mexican War suffering so acutely from post-traumatic stress disorder that he is not only a firefighter but a firebug, not only a sentimental idealist but a murderer. None of this, believe me, is played for laughs, although New York's 19th-century brutality and coarseness approach comedy in their grotesqueness. (A noteworthy passage regards a fellow firefighter, Fatty Freeborn, a bully and rapist, who eats for dinner the sheep he has loved to death during the cocktail hour. Ameliorating this bestiality are two episodes detailing the attempted rescue of ''imperiled pets'' -- a puppy bobbing downstream in one scene, a kitty trapped in a burning whorehouse in the other.)

Benjamin also falls in with Timothy Skaggs, friend to Duff and Polly, a Dartmouth dropout and black-sheep son of a New Hampshire mayor, an alcoholic daguerreotype photographer and journalist, a friend of Walt Whitman, who roams New York on the lookout for all that is novel and unexpected. This gives Andersen, seeing omnisciently through the eyes of his principal characters, opportunity to observe what's astir, what has just been invented, what is in and what out. I was once asked by a grade-school kid whether toilet paper had been invented when I was a little boy; in much the same spirit of wonder, Andersen -- generally through Benjamin or Timothy Skaggs --is besotted with the products of research masking as observation. Thus, when Skaggs was a boy ''friction matches did not exist. ... Photography was a fantasy. There were no one-penny newspapers, no private shops selling meats and fruits, no baseball, and precious few theaters or foreigners.''

Andersen is so keen to observe the wonders of his world that his characters seem able to see as clearly at night as at noon, and if his novel's back is broken by the weight of its minutiae, its flow dammed by the debris of its detail, there is something moving, a stirring spirit, in the energy of its amazement. Like her author, Polly Lucking is agog at what's on display at a New York department store; ''she did enjoy looking at gold.''

Gold, and the early days of the California gold rush, dominate the final third or so of ''Heyday'' (a terrific title, with its multiple exclamatory suggestions dominated by an exhortation). Polly and Benjamin, Duff and Timothy -- leading a wagon train of trailing characters, including the avenging hound Drumont -- find their misadventuresome ways to the golden rivers of Northern California. There the four cobble together a kind of commune, and pan laboriously for just enough precious grit and pebbles to keep them at it.

''Heyday'' tries also to be a novel of ideas, gamely providing mouthpieces to test theories of political unrest, economy and evolution, free will versus security. Darwin walks on as a character, and Engels enjoys the enthusiasm of Benjamin. Manifest Destiny is deplored, the notion of the Noble Savage mocked and embraced. Again and again Duff specifies that ''destruction and creation are the cycle of life.'' Andersen declared in a recent interview that our ''elective'' invasion of Iraq was on his mind as he invoked our earlier war against Mexico, and that the ''commune stuff'' in his novel ''reminded me of the late '60s.''

But ''Heyday'' roars awake, unexpectedly, while Polly and Benjamin drudge wordlessly together on the river, panning ''with their labor of 20 minutes'' a ''decent week's wage'' back in the world. ''There were still fortunes to be made in California. But now luck had become occasional and scarce, like luck in most places at most times.'' Now their output, pretty impressive despite the absurdly inflated cost of living, wasin decline. ''Yet Ben had Polly, thank heavens. Hadn't he? She was all that he required. Wasn't she?''

In the end, the answer to both questions will be yes, in thunder. The dead shall be raised, the evildoers vanquished. But those questions will resonate, to Andersen's credit.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (91%); PROFILES & BIOGRAPHIES (90%); BOOK REVIEWS (91%); HISTORY (89%); PARAMILITARY & MILITIA (62%); LITERATURE (78%); WRITERS & WRITING (78%) Books and Literature; Reviews
COMPANY: NEW YORK MAGAZINE (55%)
PERSON: Geoffrey Wolff; Kurt Andersen
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA (76%); LONDON, ENGLAND (66%); PARIS, FRANCE (66%) CALIFORNIA, USA (76%) UNITED STATES (76%); FRANCE (67%); MEXICO (67%); ENGLAND (66%); UNITED KINGDOM (66%); EUROPE (72%)
LOAD-DATE: March 11, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Drawings (Drawing by Barbara deWilde)(pg. 1)

(Photo by Barbara deWilde)(pg. 8)

DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1028 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 11, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Dubai on a Budget? No, It's Not a Mirage
BYLINE: By MICHELLE HIGGINS
SECTION: Section 5; Column 1; Travel Desk; PRACTICAL TRAVELER A BARGAIN EMIRATE; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 1057 words
DUBAI on a budget sounds like an oxymoron. The most ostentatious of the seven city states of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai is where travelers go to find a self-proclaimed seven-star hotel, indoor skiing and artificial islands springing up from the seas in the shape of palm trees. A stay at that ''seven-star'' hotel, the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab, starts at more than $2,000 a night.

Yet now a number of budget hotel chains are moving into this playground for the rich. Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the serial entrepreneur who founded the budget airline easyJet, was in Dubai two weeks ago to break ground on the first of six easyHotels to be built in the emirate.

The hotels, based on the easyHotel model introduced in Europe in 2005, will have rooms a little bigger than those in existing easyHotels -- but still small, around 160 square feet, with just the basics, including a bed, a shower, a flat-screen television and an Internet connection. Prices won't be announced until the opening, but are expected to be around 250 to 300 dirhams, or about $67 to $80 a night at 3.75 dirhams to the dollar.

InterContinental Hotels plans to open its first Holiday Inn Express in Dubai this summer; with 244 rooms, the hotel will be significantly larger than its counterparts in the United States.

Ibis, an economy brand of Accor, the giant French hotel company, which already has one hotel in Dubai, plans to expand with a 480-room hotel there in December and a 365-room hotel in 2008. The existing Ibis World Trade Center Dubai, linked to the International Exhibition Center and Convention Center of Dubai, has rooms from around 70 euros, $95 a night at $1.35 to the euro. And Whitbread's budget brand, Premier Travel Inn, Britain's biggest hotel chain, is building a 300-room hotel at the Dubai Investments Park. Room rates are expected to be in the 400-dirham range.

The extreme emphasis on luxury in Dubai over the last decade is precisely why the market for budget travel is wide open. While most hotel guests continue to stay at high-end places, statistics show a growing demand for lower-priced accommodations.

The number of guests who stayed in five-star luxury hotels in Dubai increased just 10 percent, to nearly 2 million, in 2005 from the previous year, according to the latest statistics available online from the Dubai Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing. By contrast, the number staying in one-star, limited-service hotels jumped 32 percent in that same time, to about 600,000.

It's not only hotels that have taken notice of the budget traveler. Anticipating a shift toward more economical vehicles in the next few years, Hertz is adding small cars like the Honda Jazz hatchback and Toyota Yaris to its Dubai fleet -- cars that rent for about $55 a day, compared with $110 for a mid-size vehicle or $220 for an S.U.V.

''The place has gotten very expensive,'' said Bob Farrow, general manager of Hertz Car Rental in Dubai. ''Everybody would love to drive a big car on vacation, but they want to pay for a small one.''

Five years ago, small cars made up just 10 percent of the fleet at his outlet, but in the next year or so, Hertz plans to increase that to about 25 percent.

While more travel companies are catering to budget travelers in Dubai, for now it can still be difficult to find the cheaper alternatives. A call asking about budget options a couple of weeks ago left a spokeswoman flummoxed at the New York office promoting Dubai tourism.

''We really focus on the high end,'' she said. ''Truly, it's a luxury market.''

The head office in Dubai wasn't much more help. Asked by e-mail about typical rates and recommendations for travelers on tight budgets, Mohamed Abdul Mannan, a spokesman for the Dubai Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing, replied with just one line -- a Web address for an online article about the recent easyHotels announcement of plans to build there.

The spectacle of modern Dubai is a product of many years of intensive development. Once a fishing and pearl-diving village, it grew into a modest commercial city in the 19th century and wasn't transformed into a metropolis until the last couple of decades. Even as Dubai's reputation as a luxury travel destination took off, savvy travelers continued to score deals -- although less remarkable ones as time went on -- even without the new influx of budget chains.

''My wallet has seen the changes,'' said Jesse Long, 34, a photographer in Brooklyn who has been traveling to Dubai on business for the last five years. Hotels where he used to stay for $30 or $40 a night are now charging four times more, he said, ''and they haven't really improved anything.''

To get the best deal, Mr. Long stays in the central Bur Dubai district, where modestly priced accommodations can still be found, particularly along Khalid Bin Waleed Road. Last month, he stayed at the Hotel Ascot (www.ascothoteldubai.com) in that area for about $130 a night and dined at nearby Indian restaurants for less than $5 a meal.

For discounted hotel accommodations, he recommends www.wired-destinations.com.

It's also possible to find a bargain by consulting the tourism desk at the airport, but to avoid any confusion later, be sure to get the terms in writing, including the rate and any incentives, like free breakfast.

Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim lunar calendar, when people of Muslim faith fast from dawn to dusk, can be a good time to find bargains since hotels tend to be less crowded and may be more willing to negotiate on price. (This year, the start of Ramadan, which varies slightly by region, begins around Sept. 12.)

While working hours are slightly altered and many restaurants are closed much of the day, there is an air of festivity after dark, said Daniela Bonanno, a sales manager at Absolute Travel in New York who has visited Dubai during Ramadan. ''After sunset, everyone celebrates because that's when they can eat,'' Ms. Bonanno said.

Shops and malls stay open longer, and hotels and restaurants offer special Iftar buffets to break the fast.

If you're on a budget, you might want to avoid traveling during the wildly popular Dubai Shopping Festival, which typically runs from late December through January, when you'll face high rates as you compete for rooms with crowds of well-heeled travelers.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: HOTELS & MOTELS (92%); HOTEL CHAINS (89%); TOURISM DEVELOPMENT (78%); TRAVEL HOSPITALITY & TOURISM (78%); LODGING INDUSTRY SECTOR PERFORMANCE (77%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (76%); CONSTRUCTION (74%); MOTOR VEHICLES (73%); CURRENCIES (71%); BRANDING (69%); AIRLINES (69%); INTERNET & WWW (67%); STATISTICS (66%); COMMERCE DEPARTMENTS (64%) Travel and Vacations
COMPANY: ACCOR SA (54%)
TICKER: AC (PAR) (54%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS722110 FULL-SERVICE RESTAURANTS (54%); NAICS721110 HOTELS (EXCEPT CASINO HOTELS) AND MOTELS (54%); NAICS561510 TRAVEL AGENCIES (54%); SIC7011 HOTELS & MOTELS (54%); SIC5812 EATING PLACES (54%); SIC4724 TRAVEL AGENCIES (54%); NAICS721110 HOTELS (EXCEPT CASINO HOTELS) & MOTELS (54%)
PERSON: Michelle Higgins
GEOGRAPHIC: DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (97%) DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (97%) UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (99%); UNITED STATES (79%); EUROPE (79%) Dubai
LOAD-DATE: March 11, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Drawing (Drawing by Monika Aichele)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1029 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 11, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

For City With Everything Else, Design Hotels
BYLINE: By ANDREW YANG
SECTION: Section 5; Column 1; Travel Desk; JOURNEYS SHANGHAI; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 1433 words
IN recent years, Shanghai has witnessed the appearance of all the accoutrements that befit a quickly growing, cosmopolitan city, with high-end restaurants like Jean Georges and flagship fashion boutiques such as Armani and Dolce & Gabbana popping up in the city's more affluent sections.

Until now, one kind of establishment has eluded the city: the boutique hotel. But a new wave of these hotels are opening this year, providing yet another lure to entice the young international travelers who are already flocking to this city, whose transformation is occurring at breathtaking speed.

While the label ''boutique'' has evolved in recent years to describe hotels of almost any size that feature a modern design concept, three new establishments -- Jia Shanghai, the Mansion Boutique Hotel and M Suites -- will epitomize the term.

Jia Shanghai, an outpost of the popular Philippe Starck-designed Hong Kong hotel, will have 55 rooms, while the Mansion Hotel, in a renovated French villa-style manor, will have just 30 rooms. M Suites, part of a new development on Suzhou Creek, with just 24 rooms, is the most boutique of them all.

With major brands racing to open locations in the city -- among them the W, Park Hyatt, the Peninsula and the Mandarin Oriental -- these new establishments represent just a small percentage of the available rooms in the city's vast hospitality landscape. Yet the appeal, in terms of buzz and prestige, is tremendous.

In April, Jia Shanghai is to open at 931 West Nanjing Road, (86-21) 6217-9000. Its arrival in Shanghai has been noted in the local press and in international travel publications like Travel & Leisure, and in guidebooks such as the Luxe city-guide series. With just about no hotel experience, Yenn Wong, the 28-year-old Singaporean entrepreneur behind the Jia concept, opened Jia Hong Kong in 2003 with the boutique-hotel originator himself, Mr. Starck, and created a runaway success that was also Hong Kong's first designer boutique property. (Ms. Wong has opted to go with the Australian firm Hecker Phelan & Guthrie to design the Shanghai hotel.)

''There are a lot of frequent travelers now, and there are more choices,'' she said. ''Even with Philippe Starck, we downplayed the design of the rooms, and made it more comfortable. And that worked very well.''

Jia, which means ''home'' in Chinese, is based on a hotel-as-domestic space concept, where rooms feel like apartments. ''This concept is something we are going to translate to all our other properties,'' she said. Another branch of Jia is to open in Krabi, Thailand, next year.

Located within a former apartment building, Jia Shanghai will feature an Italian restaurant on the second floor to be managed by the celebrity chef Salvatore Cuomo, the entrepreneur who has a chain of high-end and mid-priced Italian restaurants throughout Japan. Eventually, a bar and lounge will open on the roof. The interiors will be a series of modern but warm spaces, with touches like timber-paneled walls, a minimal style with hints of chinoiserie, and funky accents like Gio Ponti chairs and sofas by Antonio Citterio.

The hotel is entered with a private key card, a move the hotel says is intended to give guests a sense of privacy as well as exclusivity. ''We think there's a niche for this kind of product,'' said Daniel Ong, the hotel's general manager, noting that the rates for the hotel are in the mid-range, with rack rates around $275 a night -- and sometimes lower -- making it more affordable to a younger crowd who are not on corporate accounts.

That same fashionable crowd has also been flocking to the Pier One development, along the city's Suzhou Creek. Not too far away from the gallery district, the former Union Brewery has been renovated into a night-life playground, which includes a huge supper club on the ground floor, a rooftop bar and -- sandwiched in between -- M Suites, at 88 Yi Chang Road, (86-21) 5155-8399, or www.msuites.com.cn.

Set in a re-landscaped public park, the hotel, which opened in January, features a range of accommodations, from single rooms at 980 yuan (about $130 at 7.9 yuan to the U.S. dollar) to the Empress Suite at 2,888 yuan. While the design is meant to be modern and sleek -- with large flat-screen TVs, and circular beds in some rooms -- it's similiar to what's offered at W hotels.

Like the other entrepreneurs, Miao-Miao Jiang, M Suites' executive director, was also quick to emphasize the lack of designer hotels in Shanghai. ''Not many others have done it here,'' she said. ''So I don't think we have too many competitors. Also, who else can be near the downtown business center, with a park, underground parking spaces and a boating dock?'' Indeed, the hotel does feature these amenities, but its location, in a largely industrial area on the edge of the city center, puts it in an unconventional category.

If both Jia and M Suites were meant to reflect Shanghai's desire for modern amenities, the Mansion Hotel, at 82 Xinle Road, (86-21) 5403-9888, in the heart of the city's French Concession district, is a complete throwback to the swinging Shanghai of the 1920s.

Situated in a French manor-style house that was once the home of a notorious Chinese mob boss, the Mansion Hotel has been rehabilitated from a largely abandoned shell that as recently as last spring had badly sagging wood floors. With its gut renovation completed last month, this charming five-story limestone structure has been painstakingly restored into a 30-room property that feels more like a member's club for the Fortune 500 set.

Right before the hotel's partial opening last month, its developer, Lu-Jun Yin, cranked an old Columbia gramophone from 1910, and instantly the cavernous lobby, with its 15-foot ceilings, filled with a 1920s recording of the Beijing opera singer Mei Lanfang.

''We wanted to make this hotel part of the story we want to tell about old Shanghai,'' he said, noting the other classic vintage antiques housed in the new glass cases all throughout the hotel's lobby. Every detail of the hotel reflects the building's former grandeur, said Mr. Yin, now the chief executive officer of Boutique Hotels International, which is behind the development of the Mansion Hotel. In the French Concession on Xinle Road, a trendy corridor that includes coffee shops, wine bars and independent fashion boutiques, the Mansion Hotel is discreetly tucked behind a gated courtyard that has a manicured garden with a small pond.

Trying to create a hospitality experience steeped in history was an idea Mr. Yin first explored when he was general manager of Xintiandi several years ago, and opened 88 Xintiandi, the complex's signature hotel. While that project was in a new building surrounded by old shikumen, or traditional Shanghai courtyard houses, the idea had stayed with him ever since. ''I really think it's a new way to retain the city's character,'' Mr. Yin said.

Because of the crowd that the hotel hopes to attract -- corporate executives and other elite travelers -- the hotel is commanding possibly the highest rates anywhere in Shanghai, with $550 for a basic room to $880 for suites. Each room has 15-foot ceilings and a large Jacuzzi.

The Mansion's rooftop has been renovated into a bar, which looks out over the low rooftops of the French Concession. Since the hotel is small, Mr. Yin said, the public facilities, such as the first-floor lounge, the private dining rooms and the rooftop, are available primarily to guests staying at the hotel. Special key cards for entry will be issued to select friends and associates of the hotel, giving the Mansion a clubhouse-like feel.

While all of these new boutique hotels seem to signal the city's rising glamour among international travelers, these properties have all arrived, seemingly simultaneously, because of a shared belief that the market is finally ready.

''Until now, the need has not been fulfilled,'' said Ms. Wong, of Jia Shanghai. ''The people who will stay with us are not people who will normally stay in megahotels. They are a discerning lot.''

The success of these establishments will depend on their personalities, she noted, and to a degree the personalities of their developers.

Ms. Wong said the recent wave of boutique hotels may be just the beginning. Already, there is talk about other properties around the city, including another location in the French Concession and another vacant site on the riverfront Bund district that is under development.

''In the next few years,'' she predicted, ''there will be a boom in boutique hotels.''

Download 4.36 Mb.

Share with your friends: