Creating buzz in the city: Ian Schrager; Horton Plaza

·30 min·2 clips

Ian Schrager traded promissory notes for a hotel interest after selling Studio 54, launching his boutique hotel empire.

The first stop is a bar that tries not to announce itself. On the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, Frances Anderton spots the bar set back from the lobby and asks Ian Schrager why a hotel would make its social center a little harder to find. Schrager's answer is basically: because the lobby should not feel like a lobby. He wants a hotel room where people in L.A. work, relax, play games, meet people, and hang around because they actually want to be there. A bar full only of hotel guests feels dead to him. Travelers, in his view, want the same charged public rooms locals already pick for themselves. Airbnb gives the idea some teeth. When Anderton asks whether short-term rentals compete with boutique hotels, Schrager says the hotel industry is in denial and sees Airbnb as disruptive from the start. His answer is design as defense. Hotels can give people something Airbnb usually cannot: a glamorous public room with work, leisure, games, meetings, and social life baked in. That logic runs back to nightlife. Anderton links the hotel strategy to Studio 54, where Schrager and Steve Rebell changed sets almost every week in a rhythm she calls crazy and wild. Then the episode drives south. Horton Plaza in San Diego arrives as another designed stage, a postmodern retail place remembered for zaniness, movement, and plaza-like mixing. The nostalgia does not get a clean landing. The mall that once made shopping feel social is now a sad shell, while other San Diego malls are still alive and thriving. Jason Awujo, Philip Salata, and UC San Diego's Daniel Atkinson do not package the cause too neatly. Public life, retail change, and a postmodern icon are all still shifting. The episode keeps circling one question: how does design earn a public, and what happens when that public finds somewhere else to go?

As heard by us

A San Diego mall's rise and decline meets Ian Schrager's case for hotels as public gathering places.

Horton Plaza comes through as a San Diego mall that once made shopping feel playful and public, then lost that energy as the site aged. The piece keeps the focus on that shift instead of turning it into nostalgia, which helps the whole thing land.

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Why you'd press play

You want a sharp tour of Horton Plaza in San Diego and Ian Schrager's logic for hotel gathering spaces.

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