Woody Allen chooses another Bristol Hotel

Under the title "Woody Allen Soothes Rome with the Magic of Music" Socialite Life has published pictures of the American filmmaker in the Bernini Bristol Hotel in Italy's capital. He is in Rome to make Bop Decameron, with Ellen Page and Jesse Eissenberg, due for release next year. Allen clearly has a penchant for Bristol hotels... As reported in May, his latest movie, Midnight in Paris,was largely shot in Hôtel le Bristol in the French capital. 

The Bristol in Rome opened its doors in 1874, and is thought to be the oldest Hotel Bristol still functioning. 

Wrinkles on the LA Bristol

The headline in the LA paper is: JR Throws 'Westside' Hand Sign on East Wall of Bristol Hotel for 'The Wrinkles of the City'. The W sign shows you come from the city's West Side, and was apparently started by the late Baby T of the Grape Street Crips. Since then it has moved from street gangs to the fashionable. This piece of street art on the side of the former Bristol Hotel, which has recently been refurbished, is by the French artist known as JR. It's part of his Wrinkles in the City project, which installs paintings of senior citizens on the sides of buildings in the streets where they live. They are being put up in collaboration with the Free Wall Project, and are being mapped by Google. 

Read the whole story in the Los Angeles Times. 

Five-star Bristol Odessa fully restored

Discover Ukaine reports that Odessa's historic Bristol Hotel has opened after nine years of restoration, though it has been operating for a while. Part of the Vertex Hotel Group network, it is one of three 5-star hotels in Ukraine's Black Sea resort. The architect Mykola Levanevskiy told DU, "This is probably the only restoration in Odessa in which there was an attempt to save the old appointments: the mouldings, the sculpture, the ceilings. Many things were done according to pre-revolutionary photos. The restored Bristol is almost completely faithful to what Alexander Bernardazzi [the hotel’s original architect] built."  

Hotel Bristol Tuzla 'disparu'

...so says Jazzy, from Tuzla, who posts this picture, below left, of where the Hotel Bristol in Tuzla stood from 1959 until recently. In its place the bright new hotel pictured on the right is planned for the third largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It could do no better than retain the excellent Bristol name. What this sounds like in the local languages - Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian – is hard to know, though there are Bristol hotels in Mostar, and in Opatija and Lovran in neighbouring Croatia, as well as one in Belgrade. Tuzla is Turkish for salt, a reminder that the Balkans were once in the Ottoman empire (the well known Bristol in Istanbul is now the Pera Museum). Two salt lakes are part of Tuzla's central park.

Le Bristol founder's grandson at Cadot Restaurant in Dallas

The Dallas Observer today publishes an interview with Jean-Marie Cadot, chef-owner of Cadot Restaurant in North Dallas, Texas. Cadot's mother is the daughter of Hypollyte Jammet, the founder of the famous Paris Bristol, where she was born and raised. She gave him his first cookbook, he says, and he roasted his first chicken at the age of nine. Her paintings adorn Cadot Restaurant, which opened in 2009 and has received many accolades.
Le Bristol in Paris is the subject of Suha Arafat and the Hope Diamond, a chapter in High Times at the Hotel Bristol, which can be read online.

Oslo Hotel Bristol skeleton key

This item from the famous Oslo Hotel Bristol has just gone up on eBay. It says it is a "vintage brass skeleton room key and fob", and the current bid stands at $19.95.  It's hard to work out what exactly we are looking at. Sticking out at the side, the fob is rather ungainly, but it is apparently stamped with the same room number – 415 – and must have been made all of a piece because the two parts cannot now be separated. Usually fobs are something you can hook on to, but how do you "wear" this key? Clever, though, to give it a room number. No-one would suspect it could open every door.

Streisand's Bristol moment

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A Barbra Streisand fan named Hart, from Fort Lauderdale, has posted pictures on his blog of the Hotel Bristol in San Francisco from the 1972 film What's Up, Doc?, starring Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. Alongside it is a picture he has taken of the same hotel today – the Hilton, where the action actually took place. The real Hotel Bristol in San Francisco is in the Tenderloin district and it's not as elegant. It's where SCUM manifesto's Valerie Solanas died. You can read about it in "LL Cool J and the Woman Who Shot Andy Warhol", chapter 7 in High Times at the Hotel Bristol.

The Hilton-Bristol connection doesn't end there. You can find out about the heiresses who link the name in "Paris Hilton and Lady Victoria Hervey", chapter 8 in High Times at the Hotel Bristol, which can also be read online.

Gamblers' hotel discount in Russia

So, Russia has once again decided to allow certain areas of the country to run casinos. The move has been hotly debated in the country, and we don't want to get involved in the debate. All we'd like to pass on is the fact that the Hotel Bristol in Yelsk (or Elsk, it gets transliterated a lot different ways), in one the of the chosen regions, is offering a discount on its rates to gamblers. The 36-bedroom 3-star Bristol, pictured here, is a modern business-oriented hotel, but the original Bristol in this trading port on the Sea of Azov opened more than 100 years ago.

Christmas in Bristols past

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150 years ago On Christmas day 1859 the poet/painter Edward Lear arrived at the Hotel Bristol in Marseilles after a rapid journey across France on the new railways system: "Suffered from heat & cramps at first but wore thro' the night to Dijon at 2½ , & at Lyons by 6½. After that the weather cleared, & I read and looked out of windows at the mountains beyond Valence. All the better for it and afterwards the olives and stones. But the afternoon clouded and became wet. At Marseilles by 3½ . No bother with luggage. Came to Hotel Bristol, washed & dressed by 5 – table d'hôte dinner tolerable. 2 sets of English & a very nice fellow, Dr Chisholm, from India. Came to bed @ 9 and slept well."

There was still a Bristol Hotel in Marseille, at 18 Canabiere (pictured) up until around the 1960s, but there is no longer one there now.

70 years ago On Christmas day 1939 the veteran US journalist Ed Murrow (left) gave his regular 5-minute broadcast from Warsaw: "For reasons of national as well as personal secucrity I am unable to tell you the exact location from where I am speaking," he told his American audience on NBC. "Spread out beyond the roof before me is a vast sea of darkness, patchily illuminated by burning buildings... Off to the west is a line of fire that marks the location of the battle line between the German and Polish armies, a line marked by the muzzle flashes of artillery, flares hanging in the air between the two armies and burning buildings that have been struck by shells. That line goes off beyond the horizon in either direction, reaching all the way to the Lithuanian border in the north and all the way to the Czechoslovak border in the south."

.....In fact Murrow was speaking from the terrace outside the Paderewski suite in the Hotel Bristol, still a high spot in the city.