construct, including the furnishings. However, additional expenditures pushed the final construction cost to $12.5 million. To pay for the construction costs, the developers received a $5 million loan in mid-1906, followed by another $4.5 million loan in 1907. Opening and expansion The new 800-room Plaza Hotel was opened on October 1, 1907, twenty-seven months after work had commenced. The opening was attended by people such as businessman Diamond Jim Brady; actresses Lillian Russell, Billie Burke, Maxine Elliott, and Fritzi Scheff; producers David Belasco and Oscar Hammerstein I; actor John Drew Jr.; and author Mark Twain. Though the opening coincided with the Panic of 1907, the hotel suffered minimal losses. The new hotel more than doubled the capacity of the first structure, and it was intended as a largely residential hotel at opening, although the terms for "hotel" and "apartment" were largely synonymous at the time. Estimates held that ninety percent of the units were for long-term residents. The owners charged short-term guests $2.50 nightly. In addition to the apartments, there were 500 bathrooms, ten elevators, a myriad of marble staircases, and two floors of public rooms. Gates, one of the original investors, was among the residents of the new Plaza; when he died in 1911, his funeral was held at the hotel. Most of the public rooms were not originally given formal names. Although Hardenbergh had predicted that gender-segregated spaces were going out of fashion, there was a women's reception room near 58th Street; and the bar room and men's grill (respectively the present Oak and Edwardian Rooms) were exclusively used by men. In practice, the men's grill acted as a social club where discussing business was socially inappropriate, while the bar was a space to talk business. Sometime between 1912 and the start of Prohibition in the United States in 1920, the brokerage office near the entrance, now the Oak Bar, was turned into an extension of the bar room. The Champagne Porch along Grand Army Plaza was the most exclusive area of the hotel, with meals costing between $50 and $500. The basement's grill room hosted ice-skating in the summer, as well as a "dog check room" where residents' dogs could be fed luxuriously. In its first decade, the Plaza employed a staff of over 1,500. From the start, the Plaza Operating Company was already preparing for the possibility of expansion, and acquired the lots between 5 and