Rita Paul

Rita Ursel Puchalski was born in Berlin, Germany, on 1 April 1927. Her father, Jacob Puchalski, was a successful contractor and real estate investor, and her mother was Irma (Stern) Puchalski. The family was Jewish, and after the Nazis came to power in 1933 they moved to Paris. Jacob soon re-established himself in New York.

Irma stayed behind in Paris with her two children. She had organised the family's flight from Germany, and in 1940, with a single suitcase, she found a way out of Europe to join her husband in New York; the Wikipedia account records that they sailed on the SS De Grasse. In New York the family shortened its name to Puchall and moved from construction into the hotel business.

Rita studied art at Hunter College and graduated in 1947.

In 1973 the Paul family paid $900,000 for the Hotel Earle, two conjoined nine-storey buildings and a three-storey annex with room for 165 rooms, on the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Founded in 1902, the Earle had a long artistic history: it had accommodated P.G. Wodehouse and Ernest Hemingway, had been home in 1961 to Ramblin' Jack Elliott and the newly arrived Bob Dylan, and later hosted Joan Baez and Patti Smith. By the 1970s, however, Paul recalled to The New York Times in 2022, it was a "dump" for "petty criminals" and "crazies". Seven years after the purchase the Pauls moved in themselves. "We had a lot of empty rooms," she said.

Paul took the title of the hotel's artistic director and set about turning it into her personal gallery. With an in-house kiln she reproduced favourite paintings in glazed ceramic tile. Her version of John Singer Sargent's "Madame X" became the centrepiece of the lobby, and her copy of Tamara de Lempicka's "La Belle Rafaela" stretched across the bar. Elsewhere hung her oil paintings of New York City scenes and flowers, tile reproductions of Gustav Klimt, tile Vogue covers and tile portraits of 1930s and 1940s film stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford and Ann Sheridan. She installed marble floors modelled on parts of the Louvre and a metal gate she found at a Paris antique shop, and she turned down commissions to concentrate on the hotel.

By family agreement the Earle dropped its name in 1986 and became the Washington Square Hotel. It remained relatively affordable and continued to attract artists. Bo Diddley, a friend who kept a regular room, played in the lobby for the hotel's centennial, and a waitress who stepped in to sing at a jazz brunch around that time was a then-unknown Norah Jones.

In 2025, after 52 years of ownership, Paul, her daughter Judy and Judy's husband Marc Garrett sold the hotel and its restaurant, North Square, for $29 million to a group led by hotelier Henry Kallan, with Sean MacPherson and Ira Drukier, owners of the Chelsea Hotel.

Rita married Daniel Paul in 1949 after meeting him through a cousin. They were married until his death in 2017. The Pauls lived in the Washington Square Hotel from 1980. Their daughter, Judy Paul, was her only immediate survivor.

Rita Paul died on Monday 9 November 2026 at her home in Greenwich Village, New York. She was 99. Her daughter, Judy Paul, told The New York Times that the cause was congestive heart failure. Her death was reported by The New York Times on 11 November 2026 and covered by local outlets including the Village Reader.

Paul is remembered for keeping the Washington Square Hotel an independent and distinctive survivor of Greenwich Village's bohemian past while comparable old New York hotels were modernised, sold or closed. Under the terms of the 2025 sale, the new owners committed to keeping her ceramic tile portraits on the walls. Her daughter said the artwork had always been the symbol of the hotel's independence: "You'll never be able to duplicate that anywhere. This is her aesthetic, her vision."