Why you should experience The Empire Hotel in New York, NY.
The Empire Hotel is a theatrical hotel where Lincoln Square's performing-arts culture, Jazz Age glamour, after-dark energy and television mythology converge beneath one of the Upper West Side's most recognizable neon crowns.
Set along West 63rd Street near Broadway and just steps from Lincoln Center, the present hotel dates to a 1923 reconstruction of an earlier nineteenth-century property, when a 15-story building and enormous red rooftop Hotel Empire sign established the silhouette that continues to define the address. A sweeping 2008 reinvention layered the surviving exterior with a bi-level interior of warm earth tones, animal-print references, midcentury forms and Art Deco geometry while opening the roof as an 8,000-square-foot social space overlooking Lincoln Center and Central Park. The property entered another cultural chapter through Gossip Girl, where Chuck Bass purchased the hotel during Season 3 and the actual exterior, lobby and rooftop became recurring settings across the series. The result is a hotel where 1920s architecture, Lincoln Center's performing-arts world and Gossip Girl mythology have accumulated into an unusually theatrical century of New York hospitality.
What you should know about The Empire Hotel.
The Empire Hotel is best known for occupying an address with hotel history reaching into the nineteenth century before owner Herbert DuPuy demolished the earlier seven-story structure in 1922 and opened the present 15-story building on December 5, 1923, accompanied by the immense red Hotel Empire rooftop sign that became one of the property's defining architectural signatures. By 1935, published rates ranged from $2 for a single room with private toilet and lavatory to $5 for a parlor, bedroom and bath suite, preserving a revealing numerical record of the hotel during the Depression-era Upper West Side. A major reconstruction culminated on June 3, 2008 with 413 rooms and suites, a redesigned lobby and Lobby Bar, a 13th-floor Pooldeck beneath the neon sign and a new rooftop nightlife program, while the contemporary accommodation inventory has expanded to 427 rooms and suites spanning 140-square-foot Empire Express rooms through multi-bedroom connecting suites. The rooftop opened in June 2008 across 8,000 square feet, subsequently developing multiple terraces, indoor bars and elevated perspectives toward Lincoln Center and Central Park. Television then altered the hotel's cultural reach when Gossip Girl made The Empire the home and business of Chuck Bass beginning with Season 3, Episode 3, turning an operating 1923 hotel into a recurring narrative setting whose real lobby, exterior and rooftop appeared throughout the series.
Restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow established another defining chapter at the property when the Empire Rooftop opened in 2008 and Ed's Chowder House followed at street level in 2009 through a collaboration with chef Ed Brown, whose seafood career had included The Sea Grill and eighty one. Designer Jeffrey Beers shaped Ed's Chowder House around a polished coastal vocabulary, while chef Jamie Knott initially ran a kitchen serving New England clam, Manhattan blue crab and sweet corn chowders alongside raw-bar seafood, lobster rolls, scallop ravioli and arugula risotto with rock shrimp. The Empire Rooftop developed simultaneously into a nightlife destination, initially opening at 8,000 square feet before evolving into a multi-terrace composition with indoor lounges, fireplaces and views across Lincoln Center, Central Park and the surrounding skyline. Jeffrey Chodorow, Ed Brown, Jamie Knott and Jeffrey Beers consequently gave the 2008 revival a substantial food-and-nightlife character at almost the exact moment Gossip Girl began converting The Empire into a piece of international television culture.
How to fold The Empire Hotel into your trip.
The Empire Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the performance architecture and musical institutions that give Lincoln Square its cultural gravity.
Begin at Metropolitan Opera House, where Wallace K. Harrison designed the 1966 theater around a vast auditorium seating nearly 3,800 people, with Marc Chagall's The Triumph of Music and The Sources of Music facing Lincoln Center Plaza through the building's soaring glass façade. Continue to David Geffen Hall, where Max Abramovitz's 1962 Philharmonic Hall opened as Lincoln Center's first completed performance building before Diamond Schmitt Architects and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects reworked the auditorium and public spaces for a 2022 reopening centered on the New York Philharmonic. Conclude at The Juilliard School, whose Pietro Belluschi-designed 1969 building became the institutional home for one of America's defining conservatories before Diller Scofidio + Renfro and FXFOWLE expanded the complex during Lincoln Center's twenty-first-century redevelopment. The progression moves from opera through orchestral music into the training of future performers, revealing why The Empire Hotel's neon crown feels inseparable from a neighborhood whose architecture has been built around the production of music, theater and dance.
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