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Let the pillow fights begin ... |
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If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, the saying goes. And nobody knows that better than Tom LaTour. |
"If you're not in New York, you're not anybody," says the chairman of fast-growing Kimpton Hotels, which opened its first property in the city last month, the 70 Park Avenue Hotel.
Never heard of Kimpton? The company's founder, Bill Kimpton, is credited with inventing the boutique hotel concept 23 years ago in San Francisco, before Ian Schrager unveiled his first ode to hipness, Morgans, in New York in 1985. But despite its place in history, the 38-hotel chain has been little known outside the West until recently.
Watch out, Schrager. All that is changing.
"This is not our last New York hotel," says LaTour, a 20-year Kimpton employee who took over after Kimpton's death in 2001 and is leading the San Francisco-based chain on a rapid expansion eastward.
Dubbed "the best hotel chain you never heard of" this year by Money magazine, Kimpton already has doubled in size since 1999, opening 19 hotels, including its first in New Orleans, Boston and Washington, D.C. The push east of the Mississippi River also will soon bring Kimpton's first hotel in boutique mecca Miami, and the company is negotiating for properties in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Atlanta.
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