Why you should experience Club Quarters Hotel Times Square in New York, NY.
Club Quarters Hotel Times Square is a storied hotel where Midtown's club culture, theatrical energy, architectural pedigree and literary history converge inside one of West 45th Street's rare surviving turn-of-the-century hotels.
Set along West 45th Street near 5th Avenue and just steps from Bryant Park, the hotel occupies the former Webster Hotel, a 1902 Classical Revival building designed by Evarts Tracy and Egerton Swartwout, both École des Beaux-Arts-trained architects who had worked for McKim, Mead & White before establishing their own practice. The twelve-story façade follows a classical base, shaft and cap composition through rusticated limestone, red brick, terra-cotta ornament and an elaborate cornice, while its central arched entrance is crowned by a carved female head framed by limestone garlands. Webster belonged to an intense Midtown hotel-building era that produced 91 hotels between Lexington and Seventh avenues from 40th to 57th streets between 1898 and 1916, yet more than two-thirds of those turn-of-the-century properties subsequently disappeared. The result is a hotel whose limestone base, surviving ornamental style and Tracy & Swartwout authorship preserve an unusually legible fragment of the smaller hotels that accompanied Midtown's emergence as a commercial and theatrical center.
What you should know about Club Quarters Hotel Times Square.
Club Quarters Hotel Times Square is best known for becoming the first Club Quarters property in 1994, when travel executive Ralph Bahna introduced a membership-based hotel model at 40 West 45th Street after founding Masterworks Development Corporation in 1992 to develop an international network of city-center hotels for business travelers. Bahna arrived at the concept after serving as chief executive of Cunard from 1980 to 1989 and earlier developing Trans World Airlines' Ambassador Service, bringing experience across aviation and ocean travel into a hospitality concept centered on prime commercial locations, corporate membership and comparatively efficient room pricing. The Midtown property became the prototype for expansion into financial and corporate centers across New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, San Francisco, Houston and London, while corporate organizations could secure fixed rates and other membership privileges across the network. The model proved durable enough that by 2006 Club Quarters was already operating across eight major American and British cities, making the original West 45th Street address the starting point for a hospitality system built specifically around the geography and economics of corporate travel.
Long before Club Quarters arrived, the Webster accumulated a remarkable cultural biography through residents including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Gabriel García Márquez, connecting the building with American political history and twentieth-century literature. Franklin and Eleanor used the Webster as their first marital home while Roosevelt attended Columbia Law School, decades before his governorship of New York and four presidential election victories carried him into the defining political events of the Great Depression and Second World War. García Márquez later stayed there with his family after moving from Havana to New York to work for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, placing the future Nobel laureate within the building during a formative period preceding the international phenomenon of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Those presidential and literary associations now acquire another layer as the property enters a new chapter, with a 2025 guestroom renovation completed in September and the historic Webster name itself being prepared for a return to West 45th Street.
How to fold Club Quarters Hotel Times Square into your trip.
Club Quarters Hotel Times Square works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing literary ambition, Beaux-Arts architecture and twentieth-century media culture through the unusually dense creative geography surrounding West 45th Street.
Begin at Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, where Carrère and Hastings' Beaux-Arts home for The New York Public Library rose on the former Croton Reservoir site after the Astor, Lenox and Tilden collections were consolidated in 1895, with a 7.5-ton cornerstone laid in 1902 and President William Howard Taft presiding over the dedication on May 23, 1911. Continue to Rockefeller Center, where John D. Rockefeller Jr. redirected plans following the 1929 market crash into an unprecedented commercial and communications complex centered on RCA, NBC and a coordinated program of architecture, public art and entertainment that permanently reshaped Midtown during the Depression. Conclude at Radio City Music Hall, where Edward Durell Stone's architecture and Donald Deskey's interiors opened in December 1932 as the entertainment centerpiece of Rockefeller Center, bringing cinema, stage performance and the Rockettes into a vast auditorium conceived for mass audiences during the emerging age of broadcast culture. The progression moves from the marble institution that consolidated New York's great research collections through Rockefeller's city-within-a-city into the performance palace that made modern entertainment part of Midtown's architectural identity, revealing the intellectual and cultural forces concentrated around Club Quarters Hotel Times Square.
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