The InterCon: 40 years of Bucharest history

Bucharest’s landmark five-star hotel celebrates forty years of existence recently. The imposing building has been a silent witness to some of the most important events in the capital city’s history, including the 1977 earthquake and the 1989 revolution, and was designed by the same architect now responsible for the renovation of the neighboring building, the National Theater of Bucharest.

Corina Dumitrescu

The history of the InterContinental Hotel began in the 1960s when a representative of Cyrus Eaton Group arrived in Bucharest. Cyrus Eaton had the idea of building an InterContinental hotel in the Romanian capital because he did not have anywhere else to spend the night, since all the accommodation was fully booked. Thus, the Romanian Government and the InterContinental Hotel Corporation agreed to build a hotel in Bucharest. The hotel was built to a design that drew on the expertise of Romanian architects D. Hariton, Ghe. Nadrag, I. Moscu and Romeo Belea, now responsible for the National Theater of Bucharest’s facelift. Romanian constructors, engineers and workers participated in the project and the building was finished in three years, a record for those days.

In the opinion of one of the longest-serving general managers of the hotel, Marian Stancu, whose tenure ran from 1980-2004, the hotel had to abide by international standards. “There was a perfect combination of the requirements of world standards with the local specifics – from architecture to gastronomy.”

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Towering over Bucharest for 25 years

At the time of its opening, the Intercontinental was, and remained for 25 years, the tallest building in Bucharest, at 90 meters divided into 22 floors. In a design quirk, the hotel does not have an official “thirteenth floor”, perhaps reflecting one of the architects’ superstitions.

Architect Belea described the context in which the hotel was built. “In 1966, there were politically favorable conditions for the InterContinental chain to appear in Romania and for a hotel to be contracted here. With Bucharest’s chief architect, Prof. Maicu, we began researching sites for the first internationally significant hotel to be built in Bucharest. The hotel’s original design was similar to its current form, with three banana-shaped wings, but they were initially envisaged to be much longer and the hotel much shorter. Intercontinental representatives decided that University Square was the center of the city and that is why we built it here, in the place of a former restaurant, La Zisu.”

Personal stories

To its employees, the hotel was a Western oasis in a desert of communism. “When I came to work, it was like I was entering another world. I was no longer in communist Romania,” recalls Elena Burghelea, former housekeeping manager. In spite of this, some local elements were appreciated by foreigners. “Guests from abroad were very pleased with the taste of Romanian food. This was partly because we purchased our vegetables, fruit, meat and cheese from local producers and back then, in Romania, the chemical substances used abroad had not yet entered the local market. A cocktail of crab tails with raw salad and Calypso sauce was very popular in those days and cost 17 ROL,” cook Iulian Stanciu recalls.

The earthquake of 1977, the 1989 revolution, the mineriads and the more recent NATO summit are only a few of the events the hotel has been through. An employee of the hotel, who worked in the laundry, remembers the 1977 earthquake, one of the most devastating in Romania’s recent history. “There were a lot of guests in the hotel at the time. There was no severe damage, but those who were staying on the top floors got more scared. The plaster fell off some walls, and from the next day all employees took part in the clean-up. In a week, one could not even see that there had been an earthquake.”

Moving onto the 1989 revolution, of which the hotel was at the epicenter, a telex received in January 1990 from the InterContinental board congratulated the hotel’s employees “for their excellent level of service offered to guests during recent events in Romania.”

The big-name guests to have stayed at the hotel include Lenny Kravitz; Bill Gates; the Harlem Globe Trotters; Robert Gates, chief of the Pentagon and White House press officer during the NATO summit; Zucchero; Prince Hassan of Jordan; Demis Roussos; Jose Carreras; Shimon Peres, President of Israel; Jacques Yves Cousteau; Luciano Pavarotti; Boy George; Richard Claydermann; Bjorg Borg; Stan Smith; Billy Idol; Latoya Jackson; the Kessler sisters; and Yehudi Menuhin.

The hotel is owned by Compania Hoteliera InterContinental Romania, which registered a turnover of EUR 4.75 million in the first semester of 2010. It is operated, management-wise, by InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), which franchises and manages over 4,000 hotels throughout the world. The initial investment in the hotel was USD 6 million, and was supported by the Romanian state.

corina.dumitrescu@business-review.ro