Event Description

IWOSC Annual Winter Party

Monday, December 5, 2006

Sugar Plum Fairies are already dancing in our heads! On Monday, December 5, we kicked off the holiday season by returning to the beautiful and historic Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles for IWOSC’s annual winter party. Drinking and dining at Smeraldi’s, the Biltmore’s main-floor restaurant just off the old lobby, with a lavish buffet.

For guests who plan to arrive early, we also arranged two cool, free, pre-party tours.

At 5:30 p.m. one group toured the Los Angeles Central Library. This docent-led tour included the art and architecture of both the historic 1926 Goodhue Building and the new Bradley Wing with its seven-story atrium.

Our second pre-party docent-led tour was of the historic Biltmore Hotel itself. Erected in 1923, this venerable hotel was known as “the Host of the Coast,” and indeed, during the 1930s the Biltmore hosted a half-dozen Academy Awards banquets, among many lavish events. The hotel is famed for its splendid Spanish-Italian Renaissance architecture, and its interior murals created by Italian-born artist Giovanni Battista Smeraldi, who, as a youthful apprentice, worked on several palaces at the Vatican.