New York Marriott Marquis
The New York Marriott Marquis is a Marriott hotel on Times Square, in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Designed by architect John C. Portman Jr., the hotel is at 1535 Broadway, between 45th and 46th Streets. It has 1,971 rooms and 101,000 sq ft (9,400 m2) of meeting space.
New York Marriott Marquis
Manhattan, New York City, United States
1535 Broadway
September 3, 1985
US$350 million
574 ft (175 m)
51 (+2 basement)
1,844,800 sq ft (171,390 m2)
16 (passenger), 6 (service); installed by Westinghouse and modernized by Schindler twice (2006 and 2019)
1,971
57
3
The hotel has two wings, one on 45th Street and one on 46th Street, connected by a podium at ground level. The first two stories contain retail space, while the Marquis Theatre was built within the building's third floor. The hotel's atrium lobby is at the eighth floor and also includes meeting space and restaurants. Thirty-six stories of guestrooms rise above the lobby, overlooking it. The top three stories contain the View, one of New York City's highest restaurants. An architectural feature of the hotel is its concrete elevator core, which consists of a minaret-shaped structure with twelve glass elevator cabs on the exterior.
Real estate agent Peter Sharp acquired the site in the 1960s with plans to build an office building on the site. The hotel was first announced in 1972 and official plans were released in 1973, but the hotel was postponed after the New York City fiscal crisis in 1975. The hotel was restarted in the late 1970s under mayor Ed Koch. There was extensive controversy over the destruction of five old theaters on the site, and various lawsuits and protests delayed the start of construction until 1982. By the time construction began, Westin had been replaced with Marriott. The hotel opened on September 3, 1985, and has undergone several renovations and modifications since then. By the late 1990s, the hotel was one of the most profitable in the Marriott chain. Marriott bought out Portman's minority ownership stake in 1993 and acquired the underlying site in 2013.
Site[edit]
The New York Marriott Marquis is on the west side of Broadway, along Times Square between 45th Street (George Abbott Way) to the south and 46th Street to the north, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City.[4] The New York City Department of City Planning gives the address as 1535 Broadway. The land lot is irregularly shaped and covers 74,287 square feet (6,901.5 m2), with a frontage of 207.94 feet (63.38 m) on Broadway and a depth of 433.94 feet (132.26 m). The Broadway frontage runs diagonally to the 45th and 46th Street frontages. The northern end of the hotel faces Duffy Square.[5]
The sidewalk in front of Broadway was slightly widened when the hotel was built in the 1980s.[6] The widened sidewalk was known as Broadway Plaza.[6][7] As originally proposed, it would have been a pedestrian mall extending across the roadbed of Broadway eastward to Seventh Avenue.[7][8] M. Paul Friedberg had designed a plaza with benches and barriers,[7] but the plan was ultimately scrapped.[8] In the 2010s, the sidewalk was further widened, and the adjoining roadbed was converted into a permanent pedestrian plaza with benches.[9][10] The expanded plaza measures 95 feet (29 m) long and extends the curb line eastward to Seventh Avenue.[11]
The surrounding area is part of Manhattan's Theater District and contains many Broadway theaters.[4] On the same block are the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Music Box Theatre, and Imperial Theatre to the west. Other nearby buildings include the Paramount Hotel to the northwest; the Hotel Edison and Lunt-Fontanne Theatre to the north; TSX Broadway, the Palace and Embassy, theaters, and the I. Miller Building to the northeast; 1540 Broadway to the east; 1530 Broadway to the southeast; One Astor Plaza to the south; and the Booth, Gerald Schoenfeld, Bernard B. Jacobs, and John Golden theaters to the southwest.[5] Historically, the Marriott's site was occupied by five theaters: the original Helen Hayes,[a] Morosco, Bijou, Astor, and Gaiety (later Victoria), all built in the early 20th century.[13][14]
Critical reception[edit]
Of the original plans, architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that the Portman Hotel "will be not only the city's tallest, but also its most dramatic, repeating and enlarging a successful Portman formula already in operation in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco".[24] Huxtable wrote that Times Square's redevelopment was contingent on whether the "large, tide-turning" Portman Hotel was able to succeed.[238] Architectural Forum wrote that "any Portman in a storm (especially that of Times Square) will do just fine",[239][26] while The New Yorker commented, "The hotel looked like fun".[239][240] Conversely, Stanley Abercrombie of Architecture Plus said "the hotel threatens to effect, at street level, a weakening rather than a strengthening of Times Square vitality".[239][45]
In 1980, after the redesigned hotel was revealed, Paul Goldberger wrote that he supported the hotel plans. Though Goldberger was slightly disturbed by the planned destruction of the theaters, "the life of an ongoing city is always one of tradeoffs".[28][241] Abercrombie, writing for the Journal of the Institute of American Architects, said in 1982: "The new hotel may do wonderful things for the area, but it could have been even more beneficial if another site had been chosen for it."[242] Michael Sorkin characterized the hotel as "hopelessly self-centered".[243] When the hotel finally opened, Goldberger called the design outdated, with the mass "looming over Times Square like an upended bunker".[65][244] Newsday said two years after the hotel's completion that the "exterior could hold its own against anything in Dallas", while the "interior resembles the set where Luke Skywalker battled Darth Vader."[202] Herbert Muschamp said: "Throughout the hotel, design issues a protective order that makes the city outside a forbidding presence, mercifully kept at bay."[245]
Reviews of the hotel's service were mixed. U.S. News & World Report, which did not rank the hotel among the top 100 in New York City, wrote: "For some previous visitors it's this Marriott's high-caliber service that wins them over [...] but for others it's the enviable location."[59]