This old-fashioned residential-style hotel is one of the best of the small East Side operations. The Carlyle is a longstanding favorite for its polite and proper service, suave lodging, refined restaurant, top-notch old-school entertainment, and scrupulous gentility tailored for a discreet front-page clientele. The thoughtful layout enhances the intimacy of the hotel.
The 35-story 1929 tower rises high above its neighbors, affording good urban sweeps from the upper reaches. The staff is as understated as the small, reserved lobby. The latter has fine moldings, black marble, tapestries, chandeliers, antiques and Oriental rugs. The limited seating is intentional, and friendly, formally dressed staffers keep an eye on the space, quickly dispatching guests whither they are bound. This ensures privacy for guests and visitors alike.
The Regency-style dining room, abloom with spotlighted floral arrangements and highlighted with stenciling, serves refined Continental fare, and the staff is polished and deferential. The small anteroom, known as The Gallery, offers a menu of light bites as well as tea. Top-notch cabaret singers perform regularly in the costly, cosseting Cafe Carlyle supper club, but the hotel's longtime host and local legend, Bobby Short, recently passed away. Dixie jazz fans can catch Woody Allen when he shows up on Monday to blow clarinet with the Eddie Davis combo. The popular Bemelmans Bar has a gilt ceiling and lovely leather booth seating. Ludwig Bemelmans' whimsical murals are a distinctly uptown feature.
The small but well-equipped fitness center has a sauna and steam room, and massage is available. Elegant meeting rooms accommodating up to 150 people are popular for upper-echelon conclaves. Parking is now up to $50 per day. Well-behaved 
pets, 60 lb and under, are permitted.
The maintenance team makes regular rounds through the hotel, but they frequently fix things that aren't what some would consider a priority, and in turn some things that look like a priority are passed by. Since the last inspection, many of the baths have been updated.
For the most part, the individually styled guest quarters are lavishly tailored to the highest standards and equipped for high-style apartment living. There are a few superior rooms at the bottom of the rate card with questionable proportions at these rates, but the deluxe quarters are larger and more dependable. Excellent lighting, fresh greenery and flowers, serving pantries or kitchenettes, refrigerators, TVs on fabric-draped tables or dressers, VCRs, CD players, multiline speaker-phones and fax machines, and 
ample storage (with walk-in closets in many units) are standard. Most of the small mirrored baths are fitted with whirlpool tubs. Voice mail is available, but who wants voice mail when phone messages are taken by staffers and slipped under the door within minutes? The fabrics and linens are impeccable, and housekeeping is on the ball.
Best views are from upper rooms toward Madison Avenue and then Central Park beyond. Room service never stops, and the staff is always poised to accommodate any request.
The aura here is one of quintessential New York sophistication. Guests who tire of the Lowell's Lilliputian layout will find plenty of room to stretch out here.
