Post #504085 by Or Got Rum? on Wed, Jan 13, 2010 6:58 AM

And this from TIME MAGAZINE JUNE 10 1966....Mustang after Mustang rolled down the Avenue of the Stars and up the gently curving driveway, past a sparkling fountain, to halt beneath the porte-cochere. On hand to help the guests alight were doormen rigged out in Beefeater suits. Inside, phalanxes of blonde, straight-haired teenagers, wearing tight pants and no shoes, padded noiselessly through the vast, thickly carpeted lobby. Standing by the automatic elevators were delicately feminine Japanese starters in long kimonos and obi sashes.

"Coming to a hotel," says Architect

Minoru Yamasaki (TIME cover, Jan. 18, 1963), "should be an event, a fun thing." His new $32 million, 800-room Century Plaza Hotel, which opened last week in Los Angeles, is all of that and more. To begin with, there is the hotel's distinctive shape. To eliminate endless vistas down straight corridors, Yamasaki designed the hotel as a curved slab, 400 ft. long. In most new hotels, ballrooms, restaurants and shops are housed aboveground in a massive and ungainly block; Yamasaki placed them beneath notice, underground, along with a 1,000-car garage, so that the gracefully balconied slab rises cleanly from the ground.

Buried Ballroom. The hotel has no fewer than 32 shops and seven restaurants and bars, including the dimly lit Hong Kong Bar, with its bead-curtained alcoves, and the Spanish-style Granada Grill, with arched doorways and central fountain. In front, guests can wander onto an outdoor "cafe plaza," one floor below lobby level; in back, they can sip tall drinks beneath mustard-colored umbrellas in a Japanese-style formal garden crisscrossed with bridges, or take a dip in the swimming pool.