[*In a swift reversal, the owners of the Palace Hotel tell the Chronicle’s City Insider blog they’ve heard the public outcry over plans to sell Maxfield Parrish’s famous painting and will return it to the hotel after a thorough restoration in New York. No word yet on when that will be or if the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” will go back up over the hotel’s main bar—or someplace else.]
It may be worth three-to-five-million-dollars at auction, but it still isn’t the shrewdest PR move by Kyo-Ya Hotels & Resorts to take down Maxfield Parrish’s century-old “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” from over the main bar at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel and put it up for sale. (It’s to be sold at auction by Christie’s May 23.) It’s been barely four months since the chain, which also owns the Sheraton Waikiki in Hawaii, was provided $1.85 billion in new loans from Goldman Sachs. Now there’s a petition from San Francisco Architectural Heritage to save the painting for the hotel.
Image: Wally Gobetz via Flickr
