A crown jewel even among the opulent, antique boutique hotels of midtown Manhattan, the St. Regis was built by Gilded Age giant John Jacob Astor, frustrated by what he considered the city's inadequate lodgings, to provide guests he couldn't accommodate in his own homes the kind of luxury and graciousness they would expect as private guests. Opened in 1904, the Beaux-Arts palace offered a slew of unprecedented modern amenities--telephones in every room, central air and central heating, a state-of-the-art fire alarm system, modern mail chutes, and even a building-wide vacuum system that allowed maids to plug their tubes into sockets in the wall, into which dust would disappear.