The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel Preserves the Last Public Bemelmans Bar Murals

The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel holds a piece of New York cultural history that can't be replicated anywhere else. Bemelmans Bar takes its name from Ludwig Bemelmans, the author and illustrator behind the Madeline children's books, who was commissioned in 1947 to paint the murals that still cover its walls, in exchange for a year's residency at the hotel. It remains the last public installation of Bemelmans's work anywhere in the world.

Café Carlyle carries its own long-running tradition. Woody Allen has played near-weekly clarinet sets there with the Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band since 1996, an arrangement that has turned a hotel supper club into one of the more unusual, enduring live-music residencies in New York nightlife.

Between Bemelmans's irreplaceable murals and Café Carlyle's decades-old jazz tradition, The Carlyle offers something no renovation or rebrand could recreate: a genuine, continuous thread of Manhattan cultural history running through the same rooms since the mid-20th century.

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