John Boettiger, newspaperman and former son-in-law of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, jumped to his death from a seventh floor room of the hotel in November 1950.
A committee representing former world and Olympic athletes from Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia sent a petition to Lausanne, Switzerland in May 1952 asking that they be permitted to participate in the 1952 Winter Olympics at Helsinki, Finland.