Reply With QuoteMichael McDonough on Flickr
August 6, 2007
They have been doing facade work / brick replacement at The New Yorker for the past several months.
Terrific news that it will be brought back to its former glory.
It is a great NYC building and deserves the care it is getting.
Michael McDonough on Flickr
August 6, 2007
Gotham City at its finest!
Now if they can get rid of the bedbugs...
Or turn them into paying guests.
City Lore
Here at the New Yorker
By LAURA B. WEISS
Published: November 18, 2007
When the New Yorker Hotel swung open its brass doors at Eighth Avenue and West 34th Street at the beginning of the Depression, the 2,500-room Art Deco structure was considered a marvel of engineering and construction. A private tunnel whisked guests directly from the 43-story hotel into nearby Penn Station, and a laundry handled 15 tons of linen daily.
A 1929 rendering of the hotel.
Seventy-seven years later, now known as the Ramada New Yorker and owned by the Unification Church, the hotel has begun booking guests into its newly refurbished rooms in the hope of recapturing its glory days. And in its redesign, one source of inspiration came from nearly 1,000 photographs and pieces of memorabilia that have been lovingly collected by the building’s engineer, Joseph Kinney.
Gems include a photograph of Johnny Roventini, the diminutive bellhop who first sang out in the hotel lobby what became the famous jingle, “Call for Philip Morris!” Mr. Kinney also has pictures of Hollywood stars like Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, gliding across the dance floor of the hotel’s famed Terrace Room nightclub. And Muhammad Ali, defeated by Joe Frazier in the “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden in March 1971, is seen recuperating in one of the hotel’s bedrooms, the covers pulled up to his chin.
Mr. Kinney, who is also the hotel’s unofficial archivist, realizes that his collection, coupled with his deep interest in the building where he has worked for 11 years, might brand him as something of an eccentric. “If I listen to myself talking about this place,” he said, “I’d think, ‘This guy has issues.’”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company.
The postcard shows illumination at the setbacks. If this lighting scheme is no longer in use, it should be restored.
An excellent book concerning building lighting is "Architecture of the Night -- The Illuminated Building," by Dietrich Neumann. ISBN 3-7913-27-6.
Now if a developer were planning on tearing this building down instead of the Hotel Pennsylvania I'd have a serious problem.
I definitely second the motion to restore illumination to the setbacks. That looks beautiful.
I think they would need to lose the window a/c units first.
they better install some heavy drapes if they are going to be shining floodlights on the windows
Is it landmarked?Originally Posted by Stern
Or will they wait till it's too late?
I like this building just as much as the hotel Penn. Why is this one so much more worthy of saving and the other is not?
^ They both need to be kept.
Primo New York landmarks.
They both know how to be vast. That's what New York is all about.
A building like the Westin only knows how to be paltry.
Nicely put Ablarc.
Amazingly, per records at DOB, it seems that the New Yorker Hotel is NOT landmarked ...
The only mention I could find at the Landmarks' website for The New Yorker Hotel was in the LPC Designation Report for the former Summit Hotel [Warning: PDF!] by Morris Lapidus (the Summit is now the Doubletree Metropolitan Hotel at Lexington / 51st). LPC notes that in the 1950s Lapidus remodeled some interiors of the New Yorker Hotel.
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