A pall hangs over Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza, which has for nearly a century communicated a sense of the inviolable glamour of the city.

The pall comes from the recent shuttering of the Plaza Hotel, a building nearly equal to the Empire State Building as a New York icon. Of course, the Plaza shall reopen, albeit in much-altered form, no longer only a hotel but a condominium and department-store complex involving the inevitable reconfiguration of sentimentally familiar internal spaces.

Nostalgia, Vladimir Nabokov once said, is but one of a thousand tender emotions. It is best that it not sap preservationists’ energies. It’s been a long time since the Plaza has been one of New York’s best hotels. I myself prefer tea at the St. Regis. The Plaza has for years been of value to me chiefly for the commendable accessibility of its men’s room.

But the hotel has also been of value to me for its external graces. Many critics seem to find it hard to judge the Plaza a masterpiece. Yet a measure that it may be one lies in our inability to imagine or desire any other building on its site. Surely that is a measure of something.

That said, the hotel (1905-07) preceded Grand Army Plaza by nine years, and draws its splendor from the square rather than vice versa. Grand Army Plaza was an amorphous patch of green from the 1860s until architect Thomas Hastings remade it between 1913 and 1916. He did it in part in accordance with an 1899 scheme proposed by the Viennese sculptor Karl Bitter. Hastings designed a fountain – one of the sadly few first-rate ones in New York – for which he had Bitter design the crowning figure of Pomona.

The square, like all good ones, has admitted of many changes down the years. Bergdorf-Goodman, the Squibb Building, the Sherry-Netherland – none of these was there when the fountain first fronted the hotel, yet none has detracted from the setting. Not the same may be said of the General Motors Building, largely because it added a plaza of its own, disrupting the spatial order of the original square.

As for the hotel, it rises in chateauesque majesty to the design of Henry Hardenbergh, who also designed the original Waldorf-Astoria and the Dakota.

Frank Lloyd Wright, not notably given to the praise of other architects, said the Plaza Hotel was the one building in New York he wished he had designed. And in countless other ways has the hotel entered into the lore of the city. Kay Thompson’s Eloise scampered in the hotel’s halls, and in “North by Northwest,” Cary Grant got abducted from the Oak Bar. Tom Buchanan held a drinks party there in “The Great Gatsby,” and Scott and Zelda drunkenly frolicked in the fountain.

Apparently, the hotel’s new owners say that when the building reopens in roughly two years, many of its public spaces shall be as they always were. Sentimentality aside, such spaces are a sine qua non of great cities.