The Brink

The Park Hyatt in Saigon might be the only five-star hotel with a memorial in honor of a successful car bombing. On Christmas Eve 1964 a couple of VC agents drove a car bomb into the Brink Hotel, then housing US army officers, and set it off. Two officers died. The memorial stood outside the old Brink until the late 1990s when the Hyatt tore it down and started building a hotel on the site. The Asian financial crisis halted construction and the shell of the new hotel stood for years before things recovered and work was finally finished. And the memorial still stands, honoring the car bomb.