The Plaza Hotel reopens this weekend following a major renovation that saw part of the legendary hostelry converted to condominiums, an expansion of retail space, and the preservation of some designated landmark interiors. This week’s column is about the Plaza’s history. Next week’s will assess the changes.

Having opened in 1907, the current Plaza Hotel closed in April 2005 — with an October 2007 target for reopening, in celebration of the institution’s 100th anniversary. It didn’t work out, and Saturday is the official reopening date, following hundreds of millions of dollars of work on the building. Some of the designated landmark interiors are scheduled for reopening a bit later: the Palm Court in late March, and the Oak Room and Oak Bar in late spring. The original Plaza Hotel on the site began to go up in 1883. That structure was remodeled in 1888 by McKim, Mead & White. The eight-story neo-Renaissance hotel stood at the gateway to Central Park in a ritzy residential area that had not yet boomed with stores and hotels. By the time Bernhard Beinecke and Harry Black purchased the hotel in 1902, Fifth Avenue in the 50s was poised to become the premier hotel district of New York. The St. Regis Hotel, at the southeast corner of 55th Street, opened in 1904; the Gotham (now Peninsula) Hotel, at the southwest corner, opened a year later. The Plaza’s owners brought in millionaire investor John Gates to help finance a new, larger hotel on the site. The old Plaza fell to the wrecker’s ball in 1905, and construction began on the existing 19-story edifice.

Hotelier Conrad Hilton bought the property in 1943 and kept it until 1953. Boston’s Sonnabend family then owned it until 1974, when it was purchased by Western International Hotels Corp. Subsequent owners were Donald Trump (1988) and Fairmont Hotels (1995). Elad Properties bought the hotel for $675 million in 2004, and it is they who have undertaken the renovation and conversion of the property.

Back in 1905, the builders hired Henry Janeway Hardenbergh to design the new hotel. By that time, the 58-year-old architect had already made his mark on the city, and on hotel architecture. One of his most famous buildings was the Dakota apartments, on 72nd Street at Central Park West, completed in 1884. He had designed the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, constructed between 1893 and 1897 on the current site of the Empire State Building. In Washington, D.C., Hardenbergh had designed the Willard Hotel (1900–01) on Pennsylvania Avenue. He would later design Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel (1910–12). We know little of the New Brunswick, N.J.-born Hardenbergh’s background. Unlike many of the architects of his time who received such commissions, he never attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His training seems to have come mainly from working in the city for Detlef Lienau, a prominent 19th-century architect who had studied at the École. Hardenbergh’s talents suited the picturesque 1880s. The Dakota’s profusion of gables, oriels, dormers, domes, chimneys, terra-cotta accents, finials, balconies, and elaborate ironwork attests to Hardenbergh’s imagination, to which the 1880s gave free rein.

By the time the current incarnation of the Plaza went up, the 1880s had yielded to the new classicism. Hardenbergh showed something of genius in adapting a form very like that of the Dakota to suit the new taste. Compare the Plaza’s top to that of the Dakota. They are remarkably similar, with their gables, dormers, and turrets. Both are a modified French Renaissance in style, the style of the great Loire châteaux. It is a highly flexible style, classical in form but with a Gothic, or Gothic-seeming, mounting up of discrete details. Hardenbergh’s mastery of the style allowed him to use it to different effects. The somber mass of the Dakota oozes 1880-ness. By contrast, the stylistically very similar Plaza radiates a jaunty elegance. (One cannot imagine Kay Thompson’s Eloise, a heroine of children’s literature, living in the Dakota.) Of the two, the Plaza is by far the greater work, and for all of its jauntiness it commands the open spaces — of Grand Army Plaza and Central Park — all around it with authority. And it catches the light nicely, so that its details — balconies and balustrades, loggia and Francophilic ornamental devices, and not least its dense fenestration — seem not fussy but shimmery. Put a fine fountain in front of it, and you’ve got an icon of the city’s twinkly splendor.