Nearly 100 years into its life as an icon of wealth and status in New York City, the Plaza Hotel was purchased in 2004 by El Ad, a condominium developer with grand ambitions to convert the historic hotel into apartments. After a protracted fight with New York City’s powerful hotel union, the developer agreed to curtail its design, creating some 180 multimillion-dollar condominiums and retaining a small boutique hotel. The apartments opened in 2007. In this excerpt from her book The Plaza: The Secret Life of America’s Most Famous Hotel, author Julie Satow details the eye-popping sums paid by the likes of Robert Kraft, Suze Orman, and Tommy Hilfiger for these apartments—and the drama that ensued when they were far from the spectacular homes that were promised.

In New York, luxury condominiums are chock-full of owners who purchase their units through shell companies, using money obtained through possibly illicit means. But who these buyers are, and how they arrive at the building, isn’t a primary concern for developers and brokers. Like other condominium developers, when El Ad began selling the Plaza Private Residences, as the reimagined hotel rooms were called, its chief priority was to generate as large a profit as possible. A team of real estate brokers was hired to accomplish this, and their responsibilities included marketing and sales—not investigating their clients.

Alexa Lambert, an agent at the brokerage firm Stribling, was put in charge of marketing the Plaza’s splashy new condominiums. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” she told me. For Lambert and her three-person team, pitching the Plaza units was challenging, mostly because they didn’t yet exist. Unlike the grand celebration in 1907 that greeted Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, John “Bet-a-Million” Gates, and other guests on the Plaza’s opening day, in 2005, buyers were introduced to a property that was a complete wreck. Rather than red carpets, claw-foot bathtubs, and arched windows overlooking Central Park, they found a gutted structure filled with dust, loud banging, and a constant crush of construction workers. Potential buyers entering on Fifth Avenue were ushered around mountains of debris and equipment to the corner where Fifth Avenue and Central Park meet. There they found a sales office, the room’s dark wood paneling and gracious interiors converted into cubicles and oversized video screens.

It would be more than two years before the Plaza condos were complete, so Lambert and her brokerage team showed buyers idealized digital depictions of what El Ad planned to build. This was before the widespread use of virtual reality, and buyers were offered a panoply of video renderings, as well as blown-up photos of the various views, taken from every window of the gutted interior. A Plaza replica in miniature helped them envision their new homes using light up apartments to illustrate the units and floor plans. The model, while accurate in many details, was inexplicably surrounded by bucolic green hills rather than a bustling cityscape.

Even with the chaos of construction, and the fact that there were no apartments to see, that first day multiple contracts were sent out to interested buyers, and the calendar was already booked with appointments. Colleagues at other brokerage firms who wanted to see the new project complained that their calls weren’t being returned fast enough, and many grew frustrated when their high-profile clients were forced to wait days to get inside. Lambert, a pretty brunette with a friendly smile and a no-nonsense persona, did her best to handle the velocity of calls and appointments. Even with two small children at home, she would often arrive at six o’clock in the morning and still be there at eleven o’clock at night. It became so crazy that her harried team started ordering lunch as soon as they arrived in the morning, in hopes they could find a few minutes to scarf down sandwiches between appointments.

From Twelve.

Prospective buyers were willing to spend astronomically on these imagined apartments. Even by the elevated standards of the mid-aughts, when a historic real estate bubble was reaching its peak, the Plaza’s prices were high. If an exclusive Fifth Avenue home was selling for $3 million, at the Plaza a similar unit was asking $5 million; if that Plaza unit overlooked Central Park, it was even more. And absolutely everything was extra: the basement storage bins cost more than $40,000 each; the Plaza’s fitness center was accessible only by shelling out $10,000 in dues before stepping foot on a treadmill; and maid service, provided by the hotel, cost nearly $500 for a full day’s work. “It was hard to understand what a new frontier it was in terms of pricing,” Lambert told me. “It was completely new to have a $5 million or $6 million one-bedroom...It was just nuts.”