Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
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The "Spirit of '76" dinner for Republican Massachusetts senators in 1935 was just one of many grand events held at The Lenox. Rich details abound throughout The Lenox. PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF THE LENOX HOTEL (DINNER, LENOX, CARD), BY JOEL BENJAMIN (CART CAP) Original rates for "the Waldorf-Astoria of Boston." "Boston is a small town. Relationships count."—ROGER SAUNDERS employees and manages hotels with $47 million in revenue. Its flagship is The Lenox, which Roger and his four sons consider a family legacy. "The Lenox will never be sold," says Jeffrey, who is president of the company and oversees hotel operations. The hotel group also operates three franchised hotels in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. The Foundation Serendipity rather than vision steered Roger's father, Irving Saunders, a commercial real estate investor, into the hospitality business. Over lunch at the family's crown-jewel Lenox, Roger—a dapper, old-school gentleman dressed in a blue blazer, check shirt, and elephant-print tie—tells me that in 1939 his father received an out-of-the-blue call from a banker asking him to take Boston's bankrupt Metropolitan Hotel, which stood at the corner of Tremont and Broadway, off his hands. "My father was a real estate dealmaker, not an hotelier and certainly not an operations guy," Roger points out. Perhaps persuaded by an interestfree $50,000 loan, Irving went for it anyway. In 1948 he leased the Copley Square Hotel, purchasing it in 1953, and in 1976 Roger would use Irving's The Lenox, like the Pru and the Saunderses' rising new hotel, is part of the city skyline. playbook to buy the Statler Hilton. When I ask why his father was on bankers' save-us-from-receivership shortlist, Roger simply says, "Boston is a small town. Relationships count. They trusted him." Like father, like son. In 1963, Theodore Berenson, then owner of The Lenox, called Roger and said bluntly, "I've been watching you steal our business. How would you like to be my partner?" Berenson was referring to the Copley Square Hotel, which Roger was running at the time. He sold Roger 36 percent of The Lenox (which was the equivalent of what Berenson had paid for it in 1948)—and didn't even demand that he relinquish management of the Copley Square. In 1996, Roger and his sons bought out Berenson. The Lenox is the family's flagship because of its historic significance. When it was built in 1900, The Boston Post called it "the Waldorf-Astoria of Boston," a nod to its then-owner, Lucius Boomer, who had been a director of that hotel. The Lenox still recalls that era—although no longer as keenly as when Roger arrived. "When I got here, there were tubs on legs, pullchain toilets, and open elevator shafts," he recalls. But the hallways still have grand-hotel width (you could drive a car down them), and the lobby is unabashedly old-fashioned—wainscoted and wing-chaired, a gracious, dentilated, acanthus-leafed space that hasn't been "designed." Over the years, The Lenox has acquired a barnacle layer of great anecdotes. In 1907, famed Italian tenor Enrico Caruso arrived in his private railway car and took an entire floor. In 1920, Mayor Curley's son settled his father's BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM BC_F_TheLenox_Spring13-fryda.indd 99 99 2/12/13 3:17 PM