Hacker chef Marc Powell tells BoingBoing,
2600 Magazine‘s hacker conference Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) has been
held at the Hotel Pennsylvania since 1994 (bi-yearly since 2000). The
historic hotel is being torn down to make way for office spaces by the
New Jersey company (Vornado) that owns it, possibly spelling
the end of the conference as we know it.Preservation Online has this story: Link.
HOPE has been an amazing conference over the years, pulled off with
volunteer crews and hardly any money (much less corporate sponsorships of
the other “security industry” conferences like BlackHat/Defcon). It is
quite possibly the only hotel in NYC that can affordably house the
thousands of people that flock to NYC every two years to attend this
gathering of the hacker tribes.Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of 2600, writes:
First and most important – you may have heard plans announced for the
demolition of the Hotel Pennsylvania to be replaced by a huge
financial tower. This obviously would be a disaster for us and probably
would result in the end of our conferences, at least in New York. For
that reason I hope you’ll become involved in upcoming efforts to keep this
from happening.While we all know there are better hotels in the area, there are none
we could afford to hold a conference in and probably none our attendees
could afford to stay in.There is a forum on 2600’s HOPE website discussing the building demo: Link.
Reader comment: Scott Beale says,
Last night Marc sent me the sad news as well about Hotel Pennsylvania. That made me think back to when I went to HOPE in 2002 (H2K2) and shot a bunch a photos, including a few of us hacking the roof of Hotel Pennsylvania. Link.
John Hampton was one of many readers who reminds us that the Hotel Pennsylvania…
Is famous for its phone number – 736-5000 – immortalized in Glen
Miller’s song Pennsylvania 6-5000.