Room 2806, the presidential suite in the Sofitel at 45 West 44th Street, goes for $3,000 a night, which is not out of line for a suite in Midtown Manhattan. The Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle has one for $18,000. But three grand is a lot more than the seedy Hotel Seymour, which occupied the Sofitel site until being demolished in 1983, used to charge for a room. The Seymour was one of the three welfare or S.R.O. (single-room occupancy) hotels, as they were also called, on the block—44th between Fifth and Sixth—where retired theater people had been living for years at reduced rates. In the 70s, I remember, I met one Broadway widow—a heavily rouged woman in her 80s who smoked cigarettes through a long black holder and called me “Dahling,” à la Tallulah Bankhead—at the Teheran, the bar down the block from the Seymour that everybody went to after work; it, too, is gone. The two other residential hotels were the Royalton, at 44 West 44th, and the Mansfield, at 12 West 44th, which were both renovated in the late 80s and 90s when the Times Square district was “Disneyfied,” as critics called the process. They are both now boutique hotels, though not as luxurious or pricey as the haute Euro Sofitel.

The Royalton was resurrected in 1988 by the hotelier Ian Schrager. In 1992 he brought in the downtown restaurateur Brian McNally, who had opened a string of hot spots the previous decade, including Indochine, the Odeon, and Canal Bar, to run its restaurant. McNally made the restaurant—called Forty Four—and the Royalton’s Philippe Starck-designed lobby the place to eat and meet and be seen, particularly for the literati, as the Algonquin Hotel across the street had been 60 years before, when the roués of the Round Table had their famous drunken luncheons there.

On May 14 of last year, between 12:07 and 12:13 p.m., Room 2806 in the Sofitel acquired a place in the annals of tawdriness and in the rich social history of the block, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who was leading the polls for France’s forthcoming presidential election, had a hurried sexual encounter with the Guinean housemaid Nafissatou Diallo as he was preparing to vacate the suite. The circumstances—whether it was consensual or an assault—are disputed, but after Strauss-Kahn was taken off a plane to Paris later that day and imprisoned on Rikers Island on charges that were later dropped because of issues with Ms. Diallo’s credibility, a female journalist in France came forth with a similar account of having been attacked by D.S.K. eight years earlier. His career at the I.M.F. and his French presidential aspirations were finished.

If anyone on the block was scandalized by this bit of Euro-loucheness, it would have been farther down toward Fifth Avenue, in the stately neo-Georgian Harvard Club, at 35 West 44th, and next door in the beguiling Beaux Arts New York Yacht Club, at 37, whose windows look like they were plucked from a galleon. But it would be a bit of a stretch for these bastions of the old East Coast Wasp imperium, or what is left of it, to feel like their escutcheons had been besmirched. They probably don’t bear much scrutiny themselves these days, the noblesse oblige and ethos of service and stewardship of the old blueblood ruling class having been hemorrhaging since the presidency of Nixon and being, at this point, pretty much gone. Plus, this block has seen it all. The illicit trysts that have taken place on it would be impossible to chronicle. Back in the 20s, the playwright George Kaufman, who was a member of the Round Table and one of the progenitors of situation comedy, ran into an old flame in the elevator of the Algonquin Hotel, on the arm of a new beau, whom she introduced as being “in cotton,” and he came out with a memorable one-liner: “And them that plants ’em is soon forgotten.”

A First Time for Everything

Many completely different worlds, many different cultures, networks, and scenes coexist on this one block of West 44th Street. You could spend your life trying to find out what happened and what is happening along this 250-yard stretch of pavement and not begin to scratch the surface. Its baseline component is the local Midtown culture, which is New York melting pot flavored with the flimflam of Tin Pan Alley and Times Square, both within spitting distance. In fact, the Hippodrome, the largest and most successful theater in New York in the first part of the 20th century, was right on the southeast corner of 44th and Sixth Avenue. Before that it was a carriage house and stable for the trotting horses of wealthy sportsmen of the Vanderbilt-Rockefeller set. Houdini made a five-ton elephant disappear before a crowd of more than 5,000 at the Hippodrome. The site today is occupied by a nondescript glass office tower.