The Hotel McAlpin, then the largest hotel in North America, with more than one thousand rooms, had been designed to impress, and it did not disappoint. The enormous lobby, constructed with violet-rose Breche marble from Italy and pale-yellow Caen limestone from France, soared three stories and included murals around the walls by Thomas Gilbert White. The McAlpin, the only hotel in New York with a telephone in every room, boasted a ballroom, several restaurants, a Chinese tearoom, a Turkish bath, a grillroom with terra-cotta murals, and a hospital with its own surgical and medical staff. It was
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