Why you should experience AKA Times Square in New York, NY.
AKA Times Square is a theatrical residence hotel where Theater District's stagecraft heritage, residential tradition, architectural exuberance and after-dark energy converge inside a building created for the performers and long-term residents of Broadway's first great expansion.
Set along West 44th Street near Broadway and just steps from Times Square, the property began as the Hotel Gerard, commissioned by developers William Rankin and Alexander Moore from architect George Keister and completed in 1894 as a sophisticated residential hotel intended for affluent travelers and members of the emerging theater community. Keister combined Renaissance, Gothic and Romanesque influences across 13 stories, using curving bays, arches, balconies, dormers and steep gables to give the narrow building an unusually animated silhouette that recalled the Dakota Apartments while making the Gerard the tallest structure in its immediate neighborhood when completed. Actors Albert Phillips, Arthur Burckly and Josephine Williams joined playwright Augustin MacHugh among early residents, connecting the address directly with the theatrical population gathering around Broadway as entertainment migrated north into the district. The result is a residence hotel whose architecture and original social purpose preserve the moment when West 44th Street was becoming inseparable from New York theater, more than a decade before Times Square received the cultural character recognized around the world today.
What you should know about AKA Times Square.
AKA Times Square is best known for emerging in 2007 after Korman Communities meticulously restored the former Hotel Gerard and reopened the property around AKA's extended-stay residential model, establishing a contemporary chapter for an address whose architectural significance had earned New York City designation in 1982. The current accommodation program encompasses 111 contemporary suites, including a penthouse collection, with residential configurations incorporating expansive living areas, kitchens and in-suite laundry across a property conceived for stays extending beyond conventional hotel patterns. Signature two-bedroom residences develop that concept through Sub-Zero and Bosch kitchen appliances, quartz countertops, dedicated dining and work spaces, hardwood living rooms and Italian porcelain-clad bathrooms, turning substantial portions of the inventory into functioning Manhattan apartments. A bi-level Penthouse Residence crowns the accommodation collection across the building's uppermost two floors, separating two bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs from a kitchen, eight-person dining room, living room and powder room below.
Piero Lissoni supplied a separate design authorship through a.lounge, creating a 3,000-square-foot bi-level penthouse environment that extends AKA's residential philosophy into shared space through pale hardwood, contemporary furniture, large-format photography and sharply angled ceilings. The upper a.13 level surrounds a central conference table and bar with Venetian plaster walls before opening directly onto an 1,000-square-foot roof deck positioned 13 stories above the Theater District. Lissoni's composition integrates intimate seating areas, a media nook and Technogym fitness space into the same architectural sequence, allowing work, exercise and social interaction to unfold within one continuous penthouse environment. Together, the residential suites, Lissoni-designed shared spaces and rooftop setting develop AKA Times Square as an unusually complete interpretation of extended-stay living in Midtown, using domestic scale and internationally authored design to create a counterpoint to the performance culture immediately outside.
How to fold AKA Times Square into your trip.
AKA Times Square works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Broadway theater, New York publishing and Art Deco entertainment through the cultural institutions surrounding West 44th Street.
Begin at Belasco Theatre, where architect George Keister returned to the Theater District to design impresario David Belasco's technologically sophisticated 1907 playhouse, incorporating Tiffany lighting, extensive backstage machinery and Belasco's private apartment above the auditorium within a building originally opened as the Stuyvesant Theatre. Continue to New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, where Carrère and Hastings spent 16 years creating a Beaux-Arts research library above the former Croton Reservoir site, installing 75 miles of shelving before President William Howard Taft dedicated the building on May 23, 1911 and the public entered the following morning. Conclude at Radio City Music Hall, where architect Edward Durell Stone and designer Donald Deskey created Rockefeller Center's vast Art Deco entertainment palace, opening in December 1932 with an auditorium conceived for more than 5,900 people and interiors spanning aluminum, Bakelite, cork, murals and richly patterned textiles. The progression moves from Keister's own theatrical architecture through Carrère and Hastings' institution of scholarship into Stone and Deskey's synthesis of architecture, design and mass entertainment, revealing the creative world that developed around AKA Times Square's West 44th Street address.
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