Hub's grande dame changes her gown

The doorman who greeted Winston Churchill during his stay after World War II will retire his blue coat and blue cap tomorrow and don a new uniform, black with lamb's-wool lapels and black fur hat.

The Ritz Fizz -- the signature cocktail of blue Curaçao, Amaretto, champagne, and a splash of sour mix, which has been served at the bar since 1930 -- will disappear from the menu.

Finally, workers will remove the distinctive brass lion's head from the dark, wood-paneled entrance to the bar. And outside, they will hoist a new flag, emblazoned with the words, Taj Boston.

As the Ritz-Carlton falls under new ownership , it is not only getting a new name, Taj Boston, it is gaining a new identity. Many details that made the hotel an enduring emblem of Brahmin elegance for 80 years will disappear like so many petits fours set before a hungry diner at afternoon tea. The changes are bittersweet for this grande dame that, like many of its patrons, prided itself on blithe indifference to trends and fads. It was only a decade ago that the hotel finally relaxed its insistence that men wear jackets in the dining room, and that was only after Mayor Raymond L. Flynn was summarily booted from a table for daring to sup in a Red Sox cap and golf shirt.

Reaction among the faithful has been swift.

"I'm in mourning," said Karl Smith , 71, a retired Merrill Lynch executive who has been visiting the Ritz with his wife, Margaret , for 30 years. "I will not be able to call it the Taj. It will always be the Ritz-Carlton. There's so much history, if the walls could talk you could write an incredible book, on the people, the guests, and the events that have happened here."

When it opened on May 18, 1927, the Ritz was heralded as a landmark : a 17-story, 350-room luxury destination that would rival the best hotels in the world. It boasted perfume-scented elevators, a men's smoking room, a ladies' powdering room, marble fireplaces, a barbershop, and electric bells that summoned the help (no more trundling to the front desk). Two hundred people, including the mayor of New York, James Walker, paid $10, about three times the price of an average meal , to slice into thick Porterhouse steaks at the inaugural dinner. Built by Boston businessman Edward N. Wyner with the Swiss hotelier César Ritz , the place was designed to conjure the grandeur of old Europe. Even then it was resistant to change. It was only reluctantly that the hotel switched from a French-language menu to English in 1933, giving up Gateau a la Duchesse for iced sponge cake and Epaule de Mouton for roast shoulder of mutton.

"Life today is too varied, the pace too accelerated, for the American man or woman to devote his time to the art of reading a French menu card," Albert Keller, the hotel's managing director, said at the time.

Over the years, the Ritz drew a constellation of artists, heads of state, and visiting royals, and indulged their every whim.

When Cole Porter checked in, the staff wheeled a grand piano into his room overlooking the Public Garden. Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, and Stephen Sondheim got the same treatment. Ritz lore says Rodgers stumbled onto the melody for "Edelweiss" while crooning in a Ritz shower and George Gershwin tinkered with "Porgy and Bess" in his room.

The hotel also had its loyalists. Every Friday, the Ritz hosted a pre-Symphony luncheon for a coterie of young, fashionable Boston debutantes known as "the Arrogant Elegantes."

It was hardly a democratic institution.

"The Ritz people are the people who have yachts in Florida, who have Cadillacs, whose families have always stayed at Ritz hotels, who don't want crowds, who expect and demand the best," Charles Ritz , chairman of the Paris Ritz, declared during a visit in 1965. "They don't care about all these modern gadgets. You could give them a hotel where you could push a button and go to the moon and they wouldn't want it."

Such a stuffy sensibility suited the city, he said.

"You people in Boston are greedy for your traditions," Ritz told the Globe. "I think you all have a little Ritz blood in you. That's why Boston is one of the few cities in the world that is worthy of a proper Ritz hotel."

Although the Ritz changed hands several times, the name and most of its signature accoutrements had remained. No more.

Purchased in November for $170 million by Taj Hotels and Resorts, an Indian firm, the Ritz is bracing for some new touches. For one, the dining room, which closed in 2004, will reopen with a new chef. Other fixtures, like the cobalt blue goblets and afternoon tea, will stay. The Ritz-Carlton Boston Common, a 173-room hotel on Avery Street, which is owned by Millennium Partners, will also remain unchanged, name and all.

Most importantly, service at the new Taj will be "the ultimate service, just like it always will be," said hotel spokeswoman Caron LeBrun . Taj Hotels, which owns the Pierre in New York, "takes care of the most unbelievable palaces and luxuries in the world. They have a real track record."

Still, the end of the Ritz, as a beacon of old Boston opulence, has cast a shadow. Yesterday, longtime bellmen chatted about their new uniforms: gray jackets, no more blue paisley cravats. And new chefs from the Pierre, in tall white hats, toured the dining room, sizing up the space.

Kenny Young , a former doorman, stood outside the hotel, weeping as he recalled the beauty of the snow falling on the Public Garden as guests returned from the theater. He now runs a car service that picks up guests from the hotel.

"It means the passing of an era," said Young, 50. "It was very special."

Norman Pashoian , 78, who started working at the Ritz in 1947 and greeted Churchill in 1949, said he is ready for his new uniform. But not the new name.

"It's the Ritz here and it always will be the Ritz here, as far as I'm concerned," he said.