Travellers' Checks | You’ve treasured the flask, now sleep in the bed: Camel-themed hotel opens in Hong Kong

Local legend One of the more ubiquitous brands of vacuum flask – the large kind that has long supplied guests with hot water for their tea, instant coffee and instant noodles in the cheaper hotel rooms around Asia – is Camel. These lovely, retro-style containers have been made in Hong Kong by Wei Yit Vacuum Flask Manufactory since 1940, but this month the company has opened a hotel of its own, in Kowloon Bay.

Old flames Ninety years ago, on the evening of April 12, 1927, wooden scaffolding surrounding the tower of the almost-completed 38-storey Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Midtown Manhattan caught fire. Said to have been the world’s tallest residential building at the time, its upper floors were far beyond the reach of the New York City Fire Department’s hoses, but the blaze eventually burned itself out, and no lives were lost. News reports claimed that “probably hundreds of thousands” gathered to watch what was the city’s first towering inferno.

Wealthier spectators took rooms at the neighbouring Plaza Hotel for more comfortable enjoyment of the flaming spectacle, and held what The New York Times called “fire room parties”. Circling high overhead in a small, single-engine plane, and with the best views of all, were Clarence Chamberlin and Bert Acosta. They had taken off from nearby Long Island earlier that day and were, as the Times also noted, attempting to break the world flight endurance record of 45 hours. (They landed on April 14, after 51 hours aloft, which should have been time enough to fly to Paris. Charles Lindbergh became the first to achieve that feat the following month, winning a US$25,000 prize provided by New York hotelier Raymond Orteig. Chamberlin carried the first transatlantic aeroplane passenger just two weeks later.)

To celebrate 90 years, not since the fire but since the hotel’s opening a few months later, the majestic 50-room Sherry-Netherland (still a hotel but now mostly occupied by 165 private apartments) is selling a Suite Ninety Anniversary package. Rates start from a numerically appropriate US$1,927 (HK$15,000) per night, per suite, which includes a US$300 dining credit and a few other extras. Smaller rooms are offered from a more modest US$429 per night.