The never-ending glamour of the Carlyle Hotel
 Manhattan's famously discreet hotel has maintained the same sophisticated charm since it was a favorite haunt of Frank Sinatra and the Kennedys, which is why it's now enticing a vibrant new crowd to its legendary bar and historic suites.
Roberto Cavalli gown, singer Mariah Carey is climbing out of a black Bentley with her husband, the television presenter Nick Cannon, and American Idol judge Randy Jackson. Having just performed at Rockefeller Center, the diva is in the mood to keep going. She isn't headlining at a raucous downtown nightclub, however. Instead, she has pulled up on a sedate stretch of upper Madison Avenue, where the Carlyle hotel quietly presides like a gatekeeper to the Upper East Side. "Since my vocal chords are warmed up, I decided to come up here and sing," she tells a guest she encounters in the Art Deco lobby. Then she hesitates and asks, "Should I do it?"
Within minutes Carey is standing next to the piano in the hotel's famed Bemelmans Bar, surprising such guests as Proenza Schouler designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez by singing three songs in a soft Eartha Kitt-style purr. The boards she treads have history: She's performing at the same address where stars like Paul McCartney, Bono, Cyndi Lauper and Billy Joel have also appeared unbidden, along with Café Carlyle regulars like Woody Allen, who often plays clarinet there on Mondays with a jazz band; vocalist Elaine Stritch; and the late cabaret singer Bobby Short. Though the Carlyle has long defined the Upper East Side with its extra-large martinis, decor that's the design equivalent of patrician lockjaw and gossip sessions behind curtained partitions, it's only recently that a younger set has seized on its inimitable cool. As they flock to an area formerly referred to as "upstate", the Carlyle has become an unlikely point of the neighborhood's expanding compass. But despite the injection of a new social energy, it has remained a time capsule of art, entertainment and the hotel's most luxurious feature: privacy. (excerpt from Wall Street Journal)
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