NEW YORK— Directly across the street from where the World Trade Center once stood, The Millenium Hilton Hotel yesterday reopened its doors during a moving ribbon-cutting and flag-raising ceremony, bringing together the state’s and city’s top elected officials with housekeepers, bellstaff, other associates and Hilton Hotel Corp. executives. Gov. George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Ted Ratcliff, svp/Hilton-Doubletree Operations Northeast and other officials,stood on the steps of the 565-room property beneath a welcoming banner and snipped the Hilton-blue ribbon held by employees, signaling the luxury hotel’s resurrection from the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Severely impacted, although structurally sound, the property had been shuttered since that time. The trio, accompanied by members of the New York City Police and Fire Departments and members of the Port Authority Police Department, then moved to three flag poles outside the hotel. The Rev. Samuel Johnson Howard, Vicar of St. Paul’s Chapel next to the hotel and Vicar of Trinity Church, delivered an invocation, and as scores of onsite 9/11 Hilton employees— many crying— sang “The Star Spangled Banner,” Pataki, Bloomberg and Ratcliff re-raised the New York State, New York City and American flags that had been flying at the hotel that September morning. “It’s a return to hospitality down here in the downtown area and adjacent to the World Trade Center,” Ratcliff told HOTEL BUSINESS®. “We’re very, very pleased to be able to reopen. It represents a real partnership among the city, Hilton Hotels, CDL [(NY) LLC], who are the owners, in putting this all back together and making it even more beautiful than it every was. It really, in most aspects, is a completely new hotel.” The 55-story hotel, originally opened in 1992, was completely renovated and refurbished. Of 366 employees displaced by the 9/11 events, 350 have returned to the property, which will be overseen by general manager Jan Larsen, a Hilton veteran who is new to the hotel.— Stefani C. O’Connor
