REAL ESTATE: Two More for Hilton

Hustling Hotelman Conrad Hilton had a busy week. To the string of 17 hotels he operates around the world, he added an 18th, by a deal in Manhattan. To the six other hotels he has abuilding or contracted for around the world, he added a seventh in another deal in Havana. In Manhattan, he bought the 43-story New Yorker Hotel for $12.5 million. Actually, Hilton paid no cash on the transaction: instead, he gave the Manufacturers Trust Co.. owner of the New Yorker, 111,960 shares of preferred and common stock in the Hilton Hotels Corp. (worth $7,200,000), and agreed to take over the New Yorker’s $5,300,000 mortgage held by the Equitable Life Assurance Society.

The purchase gives Hilton the world’s four biggest hotels.* all of them good moneymakers. And the deal for the 2,100-room New Yorker, which cost about $19 million in 1930 and made money by luring in guests with such services as sterilized bathrooms (with the door sealed in cellophane for the incoming guest to break), fits right into Hilton’s plans of booking the big convention business flocking to Manhattan. And it was also the kind of deal Hilton hates to pass up. Just three months ago. he sold Manhattan’s 1,060-room Plaza Hotel for $15 million; the New Yorker more than makes up the loss in rooms and gives Hilton a tidy profit on the switch.

Two days after he bought the New Yorker, Hilton flew to Havana. There he signed a contract to operate a new $11 million luxury hotel in a fashionable part of the city for the Retirement Fund of Cuba’s 45,000-man Culinary Workers Union. The union agreed to finance the hotel with $6,000,000 from the fund, plus another $5,000,000 bank loan.

For the money, Hilton will give Cuba’s “Los Gastronomicos” an air-conditioned, 26-story palace twice the size of his Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico. Called the Havana Hilton, it will have 650 rooms, a swimming pool, garage for 450 cars and a rooftop nightclub with a view of the harbor and city.

Hilton, who expects the hotel to open late in 1955, will run it for the union on a 20-year contract, get 33⅓% of the profits, which the Cuban government will probably declare taxfree. Best of all, Conrad Hilton will have few worries over strikes that often plague investors in Latin America. Says Hilton, who expects to net $250,000 the first year on the deal: “Imagine, me working for the union. Oh, how I wish Joe Stalin had lived to see this.”

* The others: Chicago’s 3,000-room Conrad Hilton, Manhattan’s 2,000-room Waldorf-Astoria, Chicago’s 2,268-room Palmer House.