Why you should experience Freehand New York in New York, NY.
Freehand New York is a bohemian hotel where Flatiron's artistic inheritance, prewar residential culture and contemporary creative community converge within a former artists' address conceived as a living canvas.
Set along Lexington Avenue near East 23rd Street and just steps from Madison Square Park, the hotel occupies the former George Washington Hotel, a 1928-era building associated across different periods with poet W. H. Auden, writer Christopher Isherwood, artist Keith Haring and musician Dee Dee Ramone. Auden and Isherwood lodged at the George Washington after arriving in New York in 1939, while Haring later lived in the building during its period as a School of Visual Arts residence, giving the address a creative lineage spanning literature, visual art and music. Roman and Williams preserved original architectural character while layering the interiors with vintage Turkish carpets, houseplants, collected furniture and a mezzanine Gallery reached by the building's grand staircase, while the former library retained its wood paneling and Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. The resulting hotel carries the accumulated personality of its former residents and prewar interiors into a social environment that feels inseparable from the creative history of Lexington Avenue.
What you should know about Freehand New York.
Freehand New York is best known for opening on January 16, 2018 as Sydell Group's fourth Freehand property after Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles, introducing the brand to Manhattan through 395 guestrooms and a purpose-built collaboration with Bard College that placed hand-painted original murals inside all 395 rooms. Sydell Group founder Andrew Zobler partnered with the Fisher Center, Bard MFA Program and Bard alumni network to commission the program, turning individual rooms into distinct works by artists including Marty Abbe-Schneider, Hannah Berger, Kira Buckel, Lukas Geronimas, Martin Katzoff, Elizabeth Marshall, Isabelle Sigrid Marshall, Louise Smith, Scott Vanderveen and Rowan Willigan. Leslie Fry extended the collection into the Mezzanine Gallery through four-foot plaster sculptures combining human anatomy, vegetation and New York architectural forms, while Lia Lowenthal contributed tile panels and a piano installation, Martin Katzoff painted the passage toward the roof and Isaac Diggs photographed participating artists. The project extended beyond decoration through an ongoing curatorial structure managed by Bard alumni Zia Affronti Morter and Sean Leo, making hundreds of commissioned works and installations fundamental to the hotel's operating identity.
Andrew Zobler deepened that relationship through the Freehand Fellowship, developed with Live Arts Bard and the Bard MFA Program to embed multidisciplinary artists directly within the hotel through four paid yearlong appointments annually. Each fellowship incorporated accommodations at Freehand New York, three months of access to a dedicated 520-square-foot rooftop studio and opportunities to curate exhibitions and public programming, extending artistic production from guestrooms into the building's social spaces. Gabriel Orta and Elad Zvi created another layer of authorship through Broken Shaker, whose 2012 origins as a Miami pop-up preceded two James Beard Award nominations and a number 14 placement on The World's 50 Best Bars list before the New York incarnation opened on the roof in May 2018. Broken Shaker's New York program translated Orta and Zvi's approach through city-specific cocktails developed under head bartender Evan Hawkins, including an everything-bagel-inspired gin fizz and a Curry in a Hurry-inspired combination of vodka, gin, red-curried honey, citrus and pineapple, carrying Freehand New York's culture of commissioned creativity from visual art into mixology.
How to fold Freehand New York into your trip.
Freehand New York works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing presidential biography, artistic patronage and nineteenth-century performance through the intimate cultural geography surrounding Gramercy and Flatiron.
Begin at Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, where Theodore Roosevelt was born at 28 East 20th Street on October 27, 1858 and spent his first 14 years before the original brownstone was demolished in 1916, prompting the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association to acquire the site in 1919 and architect Theodate Pope Riddle to reconstruct the house with rooms reflecting the family residence between 1865 and 1872. Continue to National Arts Club, which acquired Samuel J. Tilden's Gramercy Park mansion in 1905 and occupied it in 1906 after George B. Post designed a connecting studio tower, preserving interiors shaped by John LaFarge's stained glass, Donald MacDonald's library dome and sculptural work by Ellin and Kitson within a house whose façade Calvert Vaux had remodeled for Tilden in 1884. Conclude at Madison Square Park, where Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's completed arm and torch for the Statue of Liberty stood from 1876 until 1882 as part of the fundraising campaign for the statue's pedestal, allowing nineteenth-century New Yorkers to encounter a fragment of the future harbor colossus years before its 1886 dedication. The progression moves from Roosevelt's reconstructed childhood world through Tilden, Vaux and LaFarge's fusion of collecting and design into Bartholdi's six-year Madison Square performance, revealing the dense concentration of biography, art and creative experimentation surrounding Freehand New York.
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