The Plaza Hotel brings French Renaissance grandeur to Fifth Avenue, a château among skyscrapers, and remains one of the grandest gestures New York's gilded wealthy ever made to themselves.

Completed in 1907 and designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, the hotel rose where an earlier, deemed insufficiently grand Plaza stood. It was built for the upper class at a moment when that class looked to France for everything: style, architecture, even the size of one's chef.

Inside, white and gold schemes, imported mosaic floors and chandeliers filled the main rooms. The Palm Court, modeled after London's Hotel Carlton tearoom, became an institution for upper-class women gossiping between charity committee meetings. Within years, the Plaza had collected residents of extraordinary eccentricity: a Hungarian princess with wolves, alligators and a falcon; one woman who invented the cocktail party; a bulldog named Captain who fetched his mistress's jewels each afternoon.

The hotel's most famous resident never actually checked in. Eloise, the mischievous six-year-old of Kay Thompson's bestselling books, "lived" in a room on the tippy-top floor. Thompson, Judy Garland's former vocal coach, both inspired and inhabited the Plaza herself, headlining the Persian Room while godmothering Liza Minelli.

VoiceMap's Gilded Age tours reveal the Plaza as the architectural apex of Fifth Avenue's Millionaire's Row, the place where the era's wealthiest gathered to confirm their own importance.