A history of New York City hotels

1836: Astor House and the first modern hotel

When John Jacob Astor opened Astor House on Broadway opposite City Hall Park in 1836, it did something no American building had done: it offered running water on upper floors, gas lighting, and free soap. Three hundred rooms, seventeen bathrooms, and a reading room. It cost around $400,000 to build, an extraordinary sum, and it established the idea that a hotel could be a landmark rather than a lodging house.

The competition that followed ran up Broadway as the city grew north. The St. Nicholas opened in 1853 and was the first hotel to cost more than a million dollars. The Fifth Avenue Hotel introduced the first passenger elevator in a hotel in 1859 — a 'vertical screw railway' — which is the single innovation that made the upper floors desirable rather than cheap. Before the elevator, the higher you climbed the less you paid.

The Gilded Age and the birth of the grand hotel

The original Waldorf opened in 1893 on Fifth Avenue at 33rd Street, built by William Waldorf Astor on the site of his own mansion, reportedly to irritate his aunt next door. She responded by demolishing her house and building the Astoria beside it in 1897. The two were joined by a corridor — Peacock Alley — and the hyphenated Waldorf-Astoria became the most famous hotel in the world.

Both were demolished in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building. The Waldorf Astoria you can visit today opened on Park Avenue in 1931, a 47-storey Art Deco tower that was the tallest hotel on earth for decades.

The Plaza followed in 1907 at the corner of Central Park, Henry Hardenbergh's French Renaissance pile, and set the template for what a luxury hotel should look like — a template that the Pierre in 1930 and the Carlyle the same year refined rather than replaced.

Art Deco and the age of the thousand-room tower

The late 1920s produced the hotels that still define the Midtown skyline. The New Yorker opened in 1930 on Eighth Avenue with 2,500 rooms and its own power plant — it generated more electricity than some small cities. The Lexington went up in 1929, the Essex House on Central Park South in 1931 with its red rooftop sign, the Waldorf in 1931.

These were not boutique properties. They were built at industrial scale for a country that had begun travelling by rail in enormous numbers, and their economics assumed permanent residents alongside transient guests. Nikola Tesla lived at the New Yorker for the last decade of his life and died there in 1943.

Decline, and the long 1970s

New York's fiscal crisis hit its hotels hard. Occupancy collapsed, maintenance was deferred, and a number of grand buildings slid into single-room-occupancy use. The Martinique on Herald Square, a Hardenbergh building from 1898, became a notorious welfare hotel through the 1980s before it was restored.

Times Square in this period was not a place tourists chose to sleep. The hotels that survived did so by serving conventions, and the city's room supply barely grew for two decades.

1984: Morgans, and the boutique idea

Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell — who had run Studio 54 — opened Morgans on Madison Avenue in 1984 with interiors by Andrée Putman. It had no sign. It is generally credited as the first boutique hotel, and the model it established (design as the product, the lobby as a social space, the hotel as a scene) has since been copied worldwide.

The Royalton followed in 1988 with Philippe Starck, and its long theatrical lobby became one of the most imitated rooms in hospitality. The Paramount came in 1990. Between them these three hotels changed what a mid-priced room could be.

The present: 700 hotels and counting

New York now has roughly 700 operating hotels and about 135,000 rooms, second only to Las Vegas among American markets. Growth over the past fifteen years has been concentrated well outside the traditional core — Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn, the Financial District and the airport corridors — driven by cheaper land and by zoning that made hotel development easier than housing.

The result is a market where a traveller has genuine choice for the first time. A room in Astoria or Sunset Park is a twenty-minute train ride from Midtown at half the price, and the directory here covers those as thoroughly as it covers Central Park South.