By the time the Plaza was acquired by the Qatar Investment Authority in 2018, its indomitable glamour had seen a free fall of successive foreign overlords. They included a Saudi prince teaming with a Singaporean billionaire, an Israeli speculator who carved up the hotel into condominiums and retail spaces, and an Indian con man who negotiated his financial exit from the most evil-smelling hospitality suite in the world, Delhi’s notorious Tihar Jail. A boutique hotel remains, but the condominium suites are mostly silent, acquired by iffy oligarchs and dubious emissaries from go-go emerging markets.

It’s galling to have to admit that Trump is the owner who leaps most vividly from the pages of this entertaining history, just as he does from cable TV. He announced his first wife’s appointment as the Plaza’s new president in what we have come to know as his unique idiom of insulting hype: “My wife, Ivana, is a brilliant manager. I will pay her one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy.” There is compensating glee to be derived from identifying the characters who continue to inhabit Trump World or have been replaced by their replicas. It was Thomas Barrack, later chairman of the Trump 2016 inaugural committee, who, as The New York Times put it, “played Donald like a Stradivarius” on behalf of the Westin group and got him to shell out more than 25 times the hotel’s expected earnings. The precursor of the Trump fall guy Michael Cohen is the equally abject Abraham Wallach, who, in a familiar trope, won Trump’s attention by going on TV as a competing real estate developer and ridiculing the price Trump had paid for the Plaza. Trump hit him with a $250 million lawsuit for defamation but then, with his unerring nose for exploitable moral weakness, hired Wallach and turned him into a pummeled foot soldier. Like Cohen, Wallach would do anything for his boss’s approval, including — in a scene worthy of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” — hiding in a secret room adjoining the Plaza’s Vanderbilt Suite to eavesdrop on a rival’s negotiations with a bank.

The other great character in this teeming cast is not a billionaire but a union leader. Peter Ward represented the 35,000 bellmen, doormen, banquet waiters and maids who made up the powerful New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council. By the time he enters the story, we’re thirsting to hear more about the downstairs life of the Plaza. I wish Satow had dwelt more on the lives of that pyramid of toiling housemaids, laundresses, bellhops and waiters who kept the Titanic afloat. Just as the flashy museums and universities of the United Arab Emirates are built on the backs of abused migrant workers, the Plaza’s luxury was underpinned by many decades of exploitation.

Some employees in Harry Black’s champagne era earned as little as 83 cents a day, with 18-hour shifts and no paid days off. The steel girding that built the Plaza, 10,000 tons of it, was hammered by the rough, tough rivet gangs, “cowboys of the sky,” who in 1906 exploded with resentment and beat a hated supervisor to death as he stepped shakily out onto the scaffolding on the eighth floor.

A century later, it was Ward who took on the Israeli owners, El Ad, when they arrogantly assumed they could carve the Plaza into condos and dispense with 900 union jobs without a fight. His “Save the Plaza” campaign was conducted with such inspired persistence and political guile that he kept the jobs of 350 union employees, won an increased severance package for the rest and preserved the Grand Ballroom, the Oak Room and the Palm Court from wanton destruction.

Today the Plaza is a grand-facade boutique hotel and retail space under pretentious deluxe apartments owned by the kind of affluent global flotsam who fake their children’s SAT scores. Yet her Serene Highness of 59th Street sails on, confidently awaiting the next custodian of New York’s social dream.