From the New York Times article New York Hotels Entice Customers with Lure of TV Life, by Diane Cardwell
In a city like New York, there are many reasons to pick a particular watering hole: a sympathetic bartender, a selective jukebox, the collection of patrons bellied up alongside you.
But for Kate Hughes and Toni Suppa, friends since high school, it was the guilty pleasures of TV’s “Gossip Girl” that helped lure them on a recent evening to the Lobby Bar of the Empire Hotel on West 63rd Street, a fixture in the series about hard-partying Upper East Side teenagers.
“We knew they had a ‘Gossip Girl’ drink list, and it’s fun,” Ms. Hughes said, laughing sheepishly as she savored a B, named for the character Blair: gin served straight up with blood orange bitters and a rock candy swizzle stick. (“Her bittersweet venom,” the bar menu elaborated, “is addictive but always leaves a sting.”)
Ms. Suppa, who was having an Eau de Vanessa, a popular concoction of pear vodka, pear nectar and white grape juice, defined that fun as dipping a toe into the show’s racy milieu. “You kind of feel like you’re a part of it, whatever ‘Gossip Girl’ is putting out there,” she said, adding, “We’re also 30 years old ——”
“So we’re doing it a little ironically,” Ms. Hughes said, finishing the thought.
These days, a number of the city’s hotels are counting on customers like them, hoping to edge out the competition by leveraging a connection — real or invented — with a popular television show or movie that sells a vision of a carousing New York.
On the Upper East Side, visitors are urged to have “A Mad Affair at the Pierre,” as Duck and Peggy once did on “Mad Men,” which began its fourth season on AMC last month. Starting at $970 for one night in a suite, the package includes a bottle of Champagne, $150 worth of room service or lobby bar dining, and a DVD boxed set of the series.
The Blue Bar at the Algonquin Hotel, which figured into some early “Mad Men” scripts, is trying to use its vintage boozy swank to capitalize on the show. It has developed special cocktails to fit the characters: 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executives and the women who orbit them through clouds of cigarette smoke. Rodney Landers, a mixologist at the hotel, said he was planning a Dirty Don Draper mojito, with dark rum to make it masculine and brown sugar to make it “dirty,” like the perennially unfaithful character, who recently revealed a taste for being slapped by a prostitute.
“Over all, I think his character’s kind of dirty,” Mr. Landers said, adding that he was working on something called the white lady, essentially a gin sidecar, for Mr. Draper’s repressed ex-wife, Betty. (No matter that on the show, Don and Betty stick to old-fashioneds and gimlets.)
In the meatpacking district, the Hotel Gansevoort is using the movie “Sex and the City 2” to draw in would-be Carries, Samanthas, Charlottes and Mirandas for a night with two Cosmopolitans by the pool, discounts at nearby boutiques, passes to a nightclub and a related book or DVD. The package starts at $545.
This cross-promotional relationship between entertainment and commerce is not new to New York — “Seinfeld” drove business to Tom’s Restaurant and the Soup Man — but it has been building in recent years, hotel and tourism executives say, as more shows make the city a central character.
“The image of New York on a global basis is so much made out of the popular culture that has proliferated about New York,” said George A. Fertitta, the chief executive of NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing arm.
He added that the TV shows and films offered glimpses into what life in the city could be.
“Sex and the City,” with its merry-go-round of flashily dressed, ambitious women eating and drinking their way through Manhattan, may have taken the relationship to extreme heights. But “Gossip Girl,” which is currently in production and was scouting the roof at the Pod Hotel in Midtown the other day for a possible shoot, has become among the most coveted shows to appear on.
Even the city is getting in on the deal: NYC & Company recently negotiated inclusion of Fashion’s Night Out, a shopping promotion it organizes with the Council of Fashion Designers of America, in a “Gossip Girl” plot line.
Blake Danner, the executive vice president of the Empire Hotel, which also serves “Sex and the City” cocktails in its lobby bar, said the two shows shared a similar marketing appeal because visitors were looking to experience the social whirlwinds they portray.
“Both shows are about an upper-end, see-and-be-seen kind of fun form of the excesses of New York City,” Mr. Danner said.
Indeed, the use of real locations, or real places meticulously reproduced, confers a sense of authenticity that can affect viewers in surprising ways, said Jennifer Foley, vice president for public relations at the Morgans Hotel Group, whose Hudson Hotel has appeared in “Ugly Betty,” “Sex and the City” and “Gossip Girl.”
“We’ve done ‘Entourage’ at the Mondrian in L.A., and that brought in hipsters and people thinking they were going to run into these guys,” she said, referring to the show’s characters. “There’s that weird perception of, maybe they really are hanging out there.”
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