"... In the record three-week-long on-site auction that followed the closing, souvenir collectors, sentimentalist, antiquarians, and dealers bid on more than twenty thousand lots of hotel property. ... The world-famous name "Waldorf-Astoria," which encapsulated the history of both an era and a dynasty, went for a token $1 to the builders of a new and otherwise unrelated hotel going up on Park Avenue. By February 1930 's great building, one of the architectural wonders of Manhattan, had been leveled."