"FITZPATRICK? WHAT DOES that mean? Don't you mean Fitzgerald?" When the Fitzpatrick Manhattan opened in 1991 its owner had quite a time introducing himself, and his 92 new hotel rooms, to the city, writes BELINDA McKEON.
‘John Fitzpatrick did the rounds of the travel agencies with his Lexington Avenue debutante, but, with the Gulf War raging and a recession sapping the country, there was scant enthusiasm for an unknown hotelier with an Irish accent and an unknown brand. In fact, with no brand at all. The Waldorf was a brand; the Hilton, the Sheraton. “That’s where we put our people,” he was told. Fitzpatrick was not a brand. Fitzpatrick was just some Irish guy’s name.
Sitting 18 years later in the presidential suite of the hotel, which is now one of the most respected in Manhattan – and one of Irish America’s biggest success stories – Fitzpatrick looks back on those early days with little fondness. The economy being what it was, he and his father were able to strike a deal for just half of the $22 million (€17 million) asking price. But the area was sketchy, and the property, an old-fashioned residential hotel for women, needed massive renovation, which had to be carried out around four elderly tenants entitled to stay on in the building until their deaths. Some aspects of doing business in the city, meanwhile, unfolded like scenes from a Scorsese film.
“You don’t understand,” said the representative of the garbage-collection company that repeatedly billed Fitzpatrick for a service he had never ordered and never received, “we’re all family here.”
“I said, listen, I know, but sure I’m in a family business too,” says Fitzpatrick, “and I’m putting the garbage contract out to bid.” The reaction of his lawyer, when Fitzpatrick phoned to tell him about the conversation? “Don’t go outside tonight.”
Fitzpatrick laughs. He clearly enjoys it, this epic of seedy old Manhattan, and you sense that he might have told it a couple of times before. But there’s much less relish in his recounting of the enormous pressure he felt in the months after the hotel first opened, when costs surged and occupancy levels merely limped. “It was very tough,” he says. “The banks weren’t happy, the private investors weren’t happy, money was really tight, and I could hear a kind of rumbling from Ireland.” Some rumblings were certainly coming from the direction of Killiney, where Fitzpatrick’s father Paddy had in 1971 begun his hotel empire by founding what is now known as Fitzpatrick Castle; Paddy had high expectations of this first foray into the US by an Irish hotel group. But it was the rumbling of much lower expectations that nagged at Fitzpatrick.
“I hate to say it,” he says, “but in the back of my mind everyone was saying, ‘Oh, Fitzpatrick, the kids, sure the father gave them everything, they came up with the silver spoon’. And I was saying to myself, if this fails and I go back to Ireland, those people will see it as proof that I had everything handed to me. That I wasn’t able to reach my own goal, make my own name.”
A father’s dream and an army of begrudgers real and imagined; that’s one hell of a stimulus package, as Fitzpatrick’s Manhattan business associates might put it. “It actually gave me strength,” he says. And besides, to counter the Irish begrudgery, there was plenty of Irish support. “They flocked here. They were excited about there being an Irish hotel. Gerry Ryan mentioned it on the radio, Angela Phelan wrote about it in the paper, and then Mary Robinson stayed here, which was a big deal, because all the heads of state always went to the Waldorf. She said, ‘absolutely not, I’m going to an Irish hotel’.” It became nicknamed, he says, “the unofficial consulate”, its lobby alive with well-known Irish faces at every turn; he made many more Irish connections in his first couple of years on Lexington Avenue than he had ever made in Ireland.
In 1995, Fitzpatrick opened a second New York hotel, at Grand Central, having converted an office building for which he paid $11.5 million (€8.8 million). Six years later, he expanded to Chicago, lured by the mayor, Richard M Daley, who wanted an Irish hotel in the city. The Chicago hotel eventually became another phenomenal success, but its timing made for another difficult debut: September 11th happened halfway through construction. It was around this time, making trips to Ireland to meet with his bankers, that he began to see astonishing change in the country he had left behind. And, though he’s quick to stress how “great” the boom was for Ireland, for Fitzpatrick it wasn’t always a comforting sight.
“I was up to my neck with Chicago,” he says, “and I was looking at all these people eating in the Unicorn, buying houses, buying cars, buying planes, and I was going, what am I doing wrong?” This is Fitzpatrick’s third recession, his second in charge of his own hotels, and his first as chair of the Hotel Association of New York City; he says this downturn is potentially much more serious for the hotel industry than the aftermath of 9/11. January, he says, has been a slower month for the hotels than September or October 2001. And sure enough, the lobby on Lexington Avenue (recently given a €7 million, Ralph Lauren-inspired renovation) is extremely quiet for lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon; in a 15-minute stretch, only one guest – the director Jim Sheridan – passes through. But the hotel group is still in strong form. It posted pre-tax profits of $4.5 million (€3.5 million) on turnover of $24.9 million (€19 million) in 2007, and is carrying, says Fitzpatrick, very little debt.
FITZPATRICK IS CERTAINLY carrying the air of a man who doesn’t have to panic about debt. He’s in casual garb – or as casual as it gets with a gold-buttoned navy blazer and a watch that looks like it could serve as the down payment on another hotel – and after this interview, he’ll drive to his house in the Hamptons (Sag Harbour, to be precise). He recently bought an apartment in a pretty gobsmacking Manhattan neighbourhood, and when he wants to relax, he rides his Harley, or flies a helicopter or a plane (not his own, he hastens to add), or goes snowboarding or (his latest obsession) kiteboarding, which he’ll next do in Puerto Rico in a couple of weeks. At 49, he’s a bachelor, but dating someone new, he says.
Not very long after wondering, in Ireland, what he was doing wrong, a bidding war over the Chicago hotel saw it reach a price of well over the $22 million (€17 million) he initially paid for it; the profit allowed him to buy his siblings out of the New York hotels (a smooth transaction, arranged for in the will of his father, who died in 2002), and he’s now thinking of opening another hotel in Washington.
Is he smug? No, even if the benefit of hindsight is practically ricochetting off the elegantly-papered walls. He’s not keen to talk about what has happened in Ireland, stressing repeatedly that he’s not an expert on property development, or on banks. But he does say two things. Firstly, that too many hotels were built, in too many locations, at costs that were too overblown – “some of them, I hate to say, as trophies”. There will now be inevitable failures and fall-offs in the Irish hotel industry, he says, and the way forward lies in restructuring; in “going back, figuring out how to do it differently, in accepting that they won’t get that €300 a night”.
His own tactics for getting through the financial meltdown have involved going after business he would never have dreamed of before: the huge accounts, the huge businesses which always went to the huge hotels for their parties, their meetings, their rooms. They can no longer afford to do that; now they have to downsize, and smaller hotels like his are in an ideal position to draw them in with smaller, more affordable packages. “In bad times,” he says, “look at the things you wouldn’t normally have gone for.”
It sounds like something his father might have said. Many of Fitzpatrick’s sentences do. It’s clear Paddy Fitzpatrick, who dropped out of Blackrock College without a Leaving Cert and began his hotel career peeling onions in the Gresham, was a formidable man, and that his influence over his eldest son remains immense. Fitzpatrick and his siblings – Eithne, who recently bought him out of the Fitzpatrick Castle in Killiney, Co Dublin; Paul, who sold the Fitzpatrick Bunratty in Co Clare in 2004, and now owns the Morgan and the Beacon hotels in Dublin; and Tony and Patrick, both property developers – grew up in the hotels in which their father worked. When he finally opened his own hotel, they watched his struggle to cope with the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and saw him devise a solution to a problem that has returned to haunt Irish developers today: a swathe of just-built, box-fresh (albeit brown and very 1970s) apartments beside the hotel, and not a single one of them sold.
Paddy’s solution was to sell half the apartments as timeshares (still, to this day, operative) to Americans who wanted a slice of Ireland. The rest eventually sold privately.
Whereas his father had started out with onions, John Fitzpatrick started out with a push-mower on the lawns of Killiney Castle, Co Dublin. Paddy was a hard taskmaster; a request one week for two days off instead of one did not go down well. “He couldn’t understand it, his eldest son,” Fitzpatrick says. “It was as if I didn’t want to work. It was a bit ridiculous, I should have stood up to him.” But it doesn’t sound as though Paddy Fitzpatrick was an easy man to stand up to. “He said, ‘you’re going to learn every single department in this hotel, because you have to know what every department is about or you’ll get no respect from the managers. And because God forbid we go bust, you’ll always be able to get a job.’”
As far as the contentious subject of time off was concerned, his father had one weekly ritual; Saturday afternoons in Brittas Bay, where he kept a mobile home and a workshop in which he was “always messing around”. What kind of workshop? Fitzpatrick bursts out laughing. “He loved doing anything, I mean for a guy who was so sophisticated in the business, he’d go into his backyard and he had this workshop with every saw, and every blade. He loved carpentry and he’d be fixing pieces of furniture that might be broken in the hotel: ‘I’m not throwing that out, I’m going to fix it.’ But it wasn’t that he didn’t want to buy new furniture, he just got a kick out of that.”
AFTER FITZPATRICK LEFT Blackrock College, he trained at Killiney Castle. He knew he wanted to go into the hotel business: “When I walked into the castle and met people, I got this buzz.” In 1981, drawing on a connection Paddy had made through his representation of TWA, he sent John to the prestigious hotel school at the University of Nevada, where his classes included a primer in hotel entertainment with live performances by Sammy Davis Jr and Liberace (the class instructor, Joe Delaney, was a critic with the Las Vegas Sun, and railroaded his showbiz acquaintances into making an appearance).
Following Las Vegas came a spell at the Holiday Inn in Chicago. Paddy saw that the US was beginning to work its charm, and ordered his son home sharpish (“Get your ass back, you’re not staying there”) to work in all three of the hotels that he had by then acquired; as well as Killiney and Bunratty, he had bought the Silver Springs Hotel in Cork. But within a few years, John was beginning to itch for his own hotel, and Paddy was beginning to reconsider his son’s prospects in the US.
New York was the toughest place to begin, but that was just how Paddy Fitzpatrick liked it. What distinguishes the hotels in the US market is their size; with an average of around 100 rooms, they’re not exactly boutique hotels, but nor are they the thousand-room monoliths looming over every US cityscape.
“That’s not our thing,” says Fitzpatrick. “Because our service is a personal service. My managers have to meet the customers.” Fitzpatrick himself also likes to meet the customers; he has a video feed from the lobby in his third-floor office, so he knows if there is someone downstairs he wants to greet. He is also known to leave personal greetings on the phones in guests’ rooms. He knows he drives some of his staff mad with this, he says, and with his insistence that they go through the guest list with him every single day, wherever he is. “I say to them, I know you think I’m a pain in the ass, but I want to make sure.”
Unsurprisingly, Fitzpatrick is by now one of the dominant players in the Irish-American scene in New York. He directs the board of the American Ireland Fund, through which a foundation which he established in his parents’ memory (his mother, Eithne, died of heart failure in 1993) has raised more than $1.3 million (€1 million) for social and cultural projects in Northern Ireland. For this work, he received an honorary OBE last year. He is also, with publisher Niall O’Dowd and financier Declan Kelly, to the fore of the Irish-American committee which backed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and which continued until last weekend to raise funds towards the clearance of her remaining campaign debt, some $6.4 million (€4.9 million). (All fundraising must stop once Clinton is appointed to Obama’s cabinet).
“I saw her two nights ago, at the last fundraiser,” Fitzpatrick says of Clinton, with whom he first became acquainted during her time as first lady; indeed, he ran an early fundraiser for her presidential campaign in the Fitzpatrick Manhattan while she was still first lady, and the decision of her husband to attend the event sparked off something of a hotel furore in New York. “Because the US president always stayed at the Waldorf,” he says, “but we got him to the Fitzpatrick.”
He wanted to see Hillary Clinton in the White House for the obvious reasons. “They have been unbelievable to Ireland over the years, and my fear was that Obama wouldn’t know Ireland, and would penalise American companies for investing outside America, which is the last thing Ireland needs.” But the appointment of Clinton as secretary of state means “the best of both worlds”, he says. “We still have a voice, a friend, in the White House. Someone in Irish Government can pick up the phone and talk to her, and she’ll know exactly what’s going on. I’ve had conversations with her about Ireland, and the North, and she knows exactly what’s going on. And the other night she said to me, ‘this just means I’ve got more trips to Ireland’.”
Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick is now thinking seriously about opening a hotel in Washington. Clinton has used the Fitzpatrick in New York, as have the Kennedys; the potential for political cache is there. As we speak, he’s preparing to go to Washington for the presidential inauguration; there’ll be balls for the American Ireland Fund and the Irish-American Democrats.
“But it’s going to be crazy,” he says, wondering aloud if he really wants to go. “$900 for a hotel room!” Is he saying he might have trouble finding a place to stay? He laughs. “Ah don’t worry,” he says. “I’ve got a room.”