Profile of Library Hotel Owner

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Further to previous message re. suit against Library Hotel...a little off 
topic but interesting...

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http://www.courtney-powell.com/text/03/091003kallan.htm

The Prague Post Profile page, 
September 10, 2003 

HENRY KALLAN'S MANHATTAN DETOUR 
Hotel mogul's route from Bratislava to Mala Strana 

By Courtney Powell 

Henry Kallan orders a bowl of ice cream for lunch before launching into an
explanation of his childhood in Bratislava. It's a classic portrait of the
entrepreneur as a young man.

"I grew up through the socialist system, obviously, but I was a happy
kid," he says. "I was a good athlete, but a lousy student, so I graduated
high school after changing three different schools. Every time I was
failing a subject, I convinced the teachers to let me pass with the
promise that Id transfer to a different school. I negotiated my way out!"

It seems an apt beginning for a young man who would go on to pursue the
American dream, arriving in the States with little more than ambition and
quickly working his way to the top of the highly competitive hotel
industry. Today Kallan owns five prestigious hotels in New York City - The
Elyse, Giraffe, Library, Casablanca and Gansevoort - and this month he
will open his first European establishment here.

The Aria, a music-themed hotel in Mal Strana, symbolizes an odd sort of
homecoming for a Slovak who had never visited Prague until he returned to
his country from America in 1990.

Iron-Curtain exit

When he was 20 in the pre-Prague Spring thaw of 1967, Kallan and a chum
were granted visas by the Austrian Embassy and resolved to leave their
homeland. But the Czechoslovak government wouldn't grant them permission
to travel beyond Hungary and Yugoslavia. So the friends headed for Zagreb,
hopped a train to Vienna and approached the Austrian border with high
hopes and frayed nerves.

The Yugoslav customs officer who checked their passports pretended to
believe the two young men when they said they just wanted to see Vienna.
He let them cross, but not without a warning.

"He looked at us, I remember today, and he said, "If you go back, don't go
home directly from Vienna. You're going to have a problem.' He knew we
didn't have permission to leave," Kallan recalls. "And then he sort of
looked at us and said, 'Good luck.' He knew exactly what was going on."
When he reached Vienna, Kallan phoned his family and girlfriend Emily
Kalandov back in Bratislava - where they had known nothing of his plans -
to explain that he wouldn't be coming back.

In a Viennese factory, he found work cutting material for raincoats and
advanced to a position selling the raincoats in a local store. Paying
tour-group leaders to bring Hungarian and Polish tourists to the shop, he
tripled its business.

Then opportunity knocked: A soccer agent who had seen Kallan play on his
school team in Bratislava recruited him to play professionally for
Innsbrucks club. Abandoning raingear for a sports career, he packed up and
moved to the Tyrol.

But a professional sports career had to wait - forever. Before he had a
chance to compete in a game, the 20-year-old refugee was granted a U.S.
immigration visa with permanent status. "I was thrilled," he says. "Going
to America was like going to the moon."

Czech connections

The ambitious immigrant arrived in New York City with $20 (nowadays all of
600 Kc) in his pocket and went straight to tryouts for a professional
soccer team. The coach told him that he could make about $100 a week if he
were exceptionally talented, but he walked away from sports again. The
other players trying out for the team were all European and South
American, so Kallan realized hed never learn the language hanging out with
them. For that kind of money, he thought he might as well find a job in a
factory or restaurant where the other employees spoke English.

His first job in the city - packaging watches in a workshop on Fifth
Avenue - ended up paying only $56 a week before taxes, but he did get a
few free English lessons. "If somebody asks 'How are you?'" his co-workers
kindly informed him, "the appropriate answer is 'None of your business.'"
English evening classes later proved more helpful.

>From the day he arrived in New York, Kallan wrote weekly letters to the
girlfriend he had left behind in Bratislava, trying to persuade her to
come visit him. He saved two or three dollars a week in anticipation of
her arrival. In 1968 Kalandov finally got permission from Prague to take a
trip to America. To her father's dismay, the young lovers moved in
together immediately.

"Her father wrote to me saying, 'If you live together, you should really
get married,'" Kallan recalls. "So I was a good guy. I married her."
Kallan became a busboy in a restaurant of the Peninsula Hotel. The
newlyweds' lifestyle started to improve. He set his sights on becoming a
waiter, eventually advancing to become the hotel's maitre d'. The next
step up was to the front desk as a receptionist.

It took a year before the Czech food and beverage director at the Plaza
Hotel got Kallan an interview there. The human resources director turned
him away, saying his English wasnt up to scratch. But the front-desk
manager, who had a Polish wife, was more sympathetic. He agreed to let the
ambitious immigrant work at the front desk for two weeks - without pay.

"He looked at me like I was crazy," Kallan recalls. "But I ended up
working there for a year" - with pay.

His upward velocity continued unchecked. Two years later, he was front
desk manager of a Hungarian-owned hotel. From there he moved to the Drake
Hotel, where he lived and worked furiously for $14 a day, learning the
business, and became assistant general manager within three years.

At the age of 27, after just six years in the States, Kallan applied for a
general manager position at a hotel down the street. The owner told him he
seemed like a very nice young man, but too green to run a hotel by
himself. "I looked straight into his eyes and I said, 'What do you have to
lose? You can always fire me.'"

He got the job. "And guess what?" he adds. "This was the hotel where I was
a busboy seven years before: The Peninsula. And the same waiters were
still there."

Workaholic?

After 13 years in the business, Kallan formed HK Hotel Group and bought
his first hotel in Manhattan. Today the family-owned enterprise manages
five hotels in New York, plans to open another one there next year, and
has overseas properties opening in Prague and Montral.

Their daughter Janette, 31, works for the HK Hotel Group handling
finances. Son Christopher, 21, in his final year of college, is majoring
in finance and marketing and wants to go to law school.

Kallan says he never liked to push his children too hard, and confesses
there were times he wasn't even sure which grades they were in because he
was so busy working. He shies away from being dubbed a workaholic. But
it's hard to resist that label when he recounts his elementary school's
40th reunion, which he attended a couple of months ago:

"Everyone had to stand up and say what they'd done with their lives - you
know, whether they were married or had children. Of course, everyone there
knows I have five hotels in Manhattan, and I try to be humble. So I just
told about how I went to America and it was pretty hard, and then I became
the managing director of a hotel company, managed to start my own
business, and from then on I just tried to make a living."

Every easygoing immigrant should do as well. 

Courtney Powell, journalist 
 
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