Sale of a Wayward Inn

From the bleak jargon of real estate listings, it was hard to recognize the old place: "A twelve-story brick and limestone hotel building equipped with steam heat (oil burner), hot water . . . two Otis drum elevators . . . three dining rooms, bar and 143 rentable units."

But Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel was much more than that. It was a wondrous, moldering accretion of legend left behind by countless wits, wags, actors, playwrights, novelists and zanies. It was the Wayward Inn of a man named Frank Case.

Urbanity Plus. Frank Case was a clerk at the Algonquin when it opened in 1902, as a West 44th Street neighbor of Sherry's and Delmonico's. Soon he was its manager, then its owner. As such, he had no use for the social register or big bank accounts. They made for dull company. He was determined "to get the Arts." He got what he wanted by providing the Arts with good food, reasonable bills which didn't always have to be paid promptly, and with his own unfailing urbanity.

The Algonquin became a Manhattan institution, and gave birth to other institutions. Most famed offspring: the Round Table, "a crowd of unusually agreeable folk": Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, "F.P.A.", Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun. In the twenties, they lunched together in the Oak Room. But when they died or drifted away, there were always younger wits to dine in the Oak Room and younger actors to sleep where John Barrymore had slept. Despite occasional rough going, the Algonquin usually earned a profit (last year's net: $200,000).

Dying Glory. But most of its glory as chambermaid to the Arts died with the death of Frank Case this June. Last week the Algonquin was sold, for slightly more than $1,000,000. The man who bought it was a newcomer to the Arts, to New York, and to the hotel business. His name: Ben B. (for effect) Bodne.

To the mellow atmosphere of the Algonquin, where he promptly established himself in a suite, hefty Ben Bodne, 43, brought a new and different tone. As a small businessman in Charleston, S.C., and onetime head of a firm dealing in home bottling supplies, he had had a run-in with federal authorities during Prohibition. Result: a $25 fine for violating the dry law. Next Bodne tried the coal business, then he started wholesaling oil. He cut no fancy figure; in Charleston he was regarded as very small potatoes. But Bodne hinted that he had made a killing in war contracts, claimed that he had sold his deep-water oil terminal for $200,000. And he laid cash on the line to buy the Algonquin, though he is now working on a refinancing deal for it.

Said he: "I just thought it was a good investment. This Frank Case, he must have been some character. I'm not going to change anything."

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