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 Americana of New York. 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. 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 Hotel Ukraina in Moscow was taller. The Americana was built, along with the adjacent New York Hilton, to serve the huge number of tourists that the 1964 New York World's Fair would bring. The hotel was also known as 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
In its original form the hotel incorporated five restaurants and no less than ten ballrooms. While designing the hotel, architect Morris Lapidus became involved in a dispute which led to his resignation from working also on the neighboring New York Hilton project. The 152.7Â m (501Â ft) hotel has a plan, less typical for its age, with a bent slab shape.
The facade consists of horizontal striping of steel-framed windows and yellow glazed brick facing. Lapidus used the bending slab style earlier in NYC in his 1961 Summit Hotel, on Lexington Avenue. At the time of its completion, the building was the tallest concrete-framed structure in the city. Its unusual frame system consists of three zones: floors 1 through 5 were supported by steel-concrete composite columns, floors 5 through 29 by concrete sheer walls and 29 to 51 by reinforced concrete columns. On the north side is a 25-story wing located above the entrance and the glass-walled lobby. The Seventh Avenue sidewalk has a striped paving that extends around the semicircular rotunda that extrudes from underneath the west end of the slab.
References
External links
- Official website
- Sheraton New York Times Square corporate website
