The Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel is a 152.7Â m (501Â ft), 51-story hotel located in New York City near Times Square. It faces 7th Avenue, West 52nd Street, and West 53rd Street. It is one of the world's top 100 tallest hotels, and one of the tallest hotels in New York City.
History
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The hotel opened on September 25, 1962 as the 2000 room Americana. It was constructed by brothers Laurence Tisch and Preston Tisch, co-owners of the Loews Corporation and was the first hotel over 1000 rooms to be built in New York since the Waldorf Astoria in 1931. With 51 floors reaching up to 152.7Â m (501Â ft), it was acclaimed for many years in its advertising and by the media as the tallest hotel in the world, based on the number and height of its inhabited floors (though the spire of the 1957 Hotel Ukraina in Moscow was taller). The Americana was built, along with the New York Hilton facing Sixth Avenue on the next block, to serve the huge number of tourists that the 1964 New York World's Fair would bring, as well as the business and convention market. The architect Morris Lapidus was originally designer of both but new owners of the Hilton project objected and he chose to resign from that commission. The hotel was also known variously as the Americana Hotel, Americana New York, and Loews Americana of New York.
On May 14, 1968, John Lennon and Paul McCartney held a press conference at the Americana to announce the formation of Apple Corps, their music label. The Americana also hosted the New York portion of the 1967 and 1968 Emmy Awards. The hotel's supper club, The Royal Box, hosted performances by musical legends including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. In 1971, a scene in The Godfather was filmed in a suite at the Americana.
On July 21, 1972, American Airlines leased the Americana of New York from Loews, as well as the City Squire Motor Inn across the street, and the Americana Hotels in Bal Harbour, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a period of thirty years. American merged the hotels with their existing Sky Chefs Hotels chain, and marketed all the properties under the Americana Hotels brand. The hotel served as Democratic headquarters for the 1976 Democratic National Convention and 1980 Democratic National Convention.
The Americana of New York and the City Squire were sold to a partnership of Sheraton Hotels and the Equitable Life Assurance Society on January 24, 1979. The Americana was renamed the Sheraton Centre Hotel & Towers. Sheraton bought out Equitable's share in the hotel in 1990, freeing them to undertake a nearly $200 million renovation in 1991, when the hotel was renamed the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers. Starwood Hotels (which had bought Sheraton in 1998) sold the hotel, along with 37 other properties, to Host Marriott for $4 Billion on November 14, 2005. The hotel continued to be managed by Sheraton, however, and was again renovated from 2011-2012, at a cost of $180 million, with the name shortened to Sheraton New York Hotel in 2012 and then changed to Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel in 2013.
Design
The hotel was built with a two-storey podium originally containing the lobby, five restaurants, no less than ten ballrooms and a large convention hall, and ‘an acre of kitchens’ with the hotel rooms in narrow slabs above. To achieve this, Lapidus employed three structural systems: floors 1 through 5 are steel-concrete composite columns, floors 5 through 29 are concrete shear walls and 29 to 51 by reinforced concrete columns. At the time of its completion, the building was the tallest concrete-framed structure in the city.
The main block of accommodation is a tall thin bent slab form, angled towards the 52nd Street corner, emphasised by the horizontal striped facade of strip windows and yellow glazed brick spandrels. On the north side facing Sixth Avenue, a lower 25-story wing is placed at right angles to the bent slab, and so at a slight angle to the street, and includes the entrance and lobby in a two-storey podium.
The dominant feature at ground level is the two storey circular rotunda projecting from under the end of the bent wing on the 52nd street corner. An image of the hotel in the 1960s can be found in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York here.
The sidewalk on all sides originally had striped paving at the slight angle of the entry and bent wing, effectively turning the Seventh Avenue sidewalk into a forecourt for the hotel.
The facades of the accommodation blocks are generally intact, but the podium levels were reclad in in the 1991 renovation, replacing the varied, light 1960s details with Postmodern squared granite.
References
External links
- Official website
- Sheraton New York Times Square corporate website
