Why you should experience The Algonquin Hotel Times Square, Autograph Collection in New York, NY.
The Algonquin Hotel Times Square, Autograph Collection is a literary hotel where Midtown's publishing intelligence, Broadway wit, theatrical sociability and Club Row culture converge within an address that became a working salon for twentieth-century American writers and performers.
Set along West 44th Street near 6th Avenue and just steps from Bryant Park, the hotel became inseparable from the Algonquin Round Table after theatrical publicists John Peter Toohey and Murdock Pemberton organized a luncheon for critic Alexander Woollcott that developed into nearly a decade of gatherings by Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Franklin P. Adams and other members of the self-described Vicious Circle. Harold Ross and Jane Grant moved through that same social orbit before founding The New Yorker, while Parker contributed to its inaugural issue and continued writing fiction, poetry and criticism for the magazine across three decades. Tallulah Bankhead lived at the Algonquin from age 16, paying $21 per week for a room with a bath, while later residents and regulars included Maya Angelou, William Faulkner, Helen Hayes and members of the Barrymore family. The result is a hotel where Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross and generations of writers turned a Midtown lobby into an enduring expression of New York's literary and theatrical imagination.
What you should know about The Algonquin Hotel Times Square.
The Algonquin Hotel Times Square, Autograph Collection is best known for opening in 1902 as a 12-story apartment hotel designed by 28-year-old Goldwin Starrett, whose first Manhattan commission was erected by Thompson-Starrett Company in seven months after Puritan Realty Company acquired the 7,200-square-foot West 44th Street site for $180,000 and budgeted $500,000 to $600,000 for construction. Originally conceived for long-term occupancy, the property opened with 75 percent of its units already occupied and offered in-suite telephones, heating and plumbing, annual rents ranging from $420 for a single room to $2,520 for a three-bedroom suite, and nightly rates extending from $2 to $10. Frank Case joined the property before opening, took over its lease in 1907 and ultimately purchased the hotel for $1 million in 1927, remaining its defining proprietor until his death in 1946. The building received New York City protection in 1987, National Literary Landmark designation in 1996 and became the first New York City property admitted to Marriott's Autograph Collection in 2010, while its contemporary inventory comprises 181 guestrooms and suites. Goldwin Starrett's first Manhattan hotel, Frank Case's four-decade stewardship, three formal heritage affiliations and more than a century of continuous operation give The Algonquin a hospitality lineage with unusual institutional continuity.
The Oak Room developed a separate performance lineage when cabaret impresario Donald Smith reopened the intimate space in 1981 with singer-pianist Steve Ross, beginning a program that helped advance the careers of Harry Connick Jr., Diana Krall, Michael Feinstein, Peter Cincotti and Andrea Marcovicci. Alexandra Champalimaud subsequently directed a $5 million reconstruction that closed the hotel for nine months in 2012, establishing another design chapter before Stonehill Taylor reworked the public interiors a decade later through velvet drapery, theatrical lighting, literary motifs and restored oak paneling. Stonehill Taylor returned the Blue Bar to its original lobby footprint, reimagined the Oak Room as an event space and collaborated with a cat psychologist on reception-area perches and retreats for resident feline Hamlet VIII, continuing a house-cat tradition begun when actor John Barrymore suggested the name Hamlet for an earlier stray. Together, Donald Smith, Alexandra Champalimaud, Stonehill Taylor and John Barrymore connect cabaret, interior design and one of New York hospitality's most unusual traditions within the same creative lineage that has repeatedly renewed The Algonquin.
How to fold The Algonquin Hotel Times Square into your trip.
The Algonquin Hotel Times Square, Autograph Collection works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing literature, public culture and theatrical craftsmanship through the blocks surrounding Club Row.
Begin at New York Public Library, where Carrère and Hastings spent 16 years bringing the Fifth Avenue Beaux-Arts building to completion before President William Howard Taft presided over its May 23, 1911 dedication, with more than one million books already installed across stacks incorporating 75 miles of shelving and as many as 50,000 people entering on the first public day. Continue into Bryant Park, where Lusby Simpson's competition-winning French garden plan was implemented under Robert Moses in 1934 before Daniel A. Biederman, Andrew Heiskell and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund established Bryant Park Restoration Corporation in 1980 and eventually oversaw a four-year reconstruction culminating in 2,000 movable bistro chairs and the park's 1992 reopening. Conclude at Belasco Theatre, where architect George Keister created the 1907 Stuyvesant Theatre for producer David Belasco with Tiffany ceiling panels and lighting, Everett Shinn murals, elaborate woodwork and Belasco's own ten-room penthouse above the auditorium. The progression moves from Carrère and Hastings's palace of books through Simpson and Biederman's evolving public room into Belasco and Keister's intensely authored theater, reconstructing the literary, social and performing-arts ecosystem that gave The Algonquin Hotel Times Square, Autograph Collection its enduring cultural context.
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