The Oak Room restaurant at the Plaza Hotel has been a storied part of New York’s social history for more than a hundred years.
It opened in 1907 as the Men’s Bar – women were not permitted to enter. During Prohibition (1920-1933) when the sale of alcohol was forbidden, it became known as the Café or Oak Lounge.
It re-opened in 1934 as the Oak Room and Bar and by the late 1940s, women were grudgingly allowed into the revered restaurant in summers but restricted for the rest of the year, apparently to allow men to do their business-dealing in peace.
By the early 1950s, women were permitted in the Oak Room and Bar in the evenings year-round but there was still a strict Men-Only lunch from 12 till 3pm on weekdays while the stock exchange operated.
These circumstances finally changed when activist for women’s rights and co-founder of the National Organization for Women Betty Friedan staged a protest.
Friedan, who had written her 1963 best-selling book The Feminine Mystique arguing for gender equality, staged a sit-in at the Plaza with a group of other women. They ignored the maître d’ and held signs saying Wake up PLAZA! And The Oak Room is Outside the Law.
Four of them, including Friedan, attempted to sit for lunch and their table was physically removed by harried waiters, leaving the women sitting in a circle around empty space.
But the protest did the trick, attracting media attention and about four months later, the Oak Room abandoned its 60-year policy of prohibiting women.
Outside of this controversy, the Oak Room was the gathering place for the likes of authors Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, who lunched there regularly. ‘They nibbled at their friends during the first course, devoured their enemies during the second and savored their own glorious futures over coffee and dessert,’ writer Gerald Clarke wittily noted in his biography Capote.
It has appeared in films such as Arthur (1981) starring Dudley Moore and Sir John Gielgud and Scent of a Woman (1992) starring Al Pacino. Alfred Hitchcock set the opening scene of his film North by Northwest starring Cary Grant in the Oak Room – though for space reasons it was filmed elsewhere. It also featured in the TV series Gossip Girl.
The opulent German Renaissance Revival-style space with frescoes of Bavarian castles and a chandelier draped with grapes and topped by a barmaid hosting a stein of beer is now only available for private events.