Why you should experience The Evelyn in New York, NY.
The Evelyn is a melodic boutique hotel where NoMad's Tin Pan Alley inheritance, theatrical imagination, Beaux-Arts character and century-spanning culture of creative reinvention converge within a hotel that has repeatedly rewritten itself alongside New York.
Set along East 27th Street near 5th Avenue and just steps from Madison Square Park, the property occupies a Beaux-Arts building designed by William H. Birkmire in 1903 and opened in 1905 as Hotel Broztell, when the surrounding blocks formed part of the music-publishing world of Tin Pan Alley. The building became the Gershwin Hotel in 1992 before assuming its current name in tribute to actress and model Evelyn Nesbit, whose early twentieth-century celebrity made her one of the defining faces of her era. Triumph Hotels later commissioned Parts and Labor Design and Silvia Zofio to reinterpret the property through a 40-foot stained-glass lobby installation, Art Nouveau-inspired guestrooms, gramophones and trombone-shaped chandeliers referencing the neighborhood's musical inheritance. The result is a hotel where Birkmire's architecture, Tin Pan Alley's songwriting culture, Nesbit's celebrity and contemporary design preserve more than a century of NoMad creative history within the same address.
What you should know about The Evelyn.
The Evelyn is best known for opening in 1905 as Hotel Broztell inside a Beaux-Arts building designed by William H. Birkmire in 1903, when the surrounding NoMad streets belonged to Tin Pan Alley, the music-publishing ecosystem associated with composers and songwriters including George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. The property became the Gershwin Hotel in 1992, later took the name of actress and model Evelyn Nesbit, and entered its current chapter within Triumph Hotels, the New York collection founded by Gerald Barad and Shimmie Horn in 2014. A multimillion-dollar reconstruction culminated in a November 14, 2018 relaunch with 159 guestrooms refreshed by Silvia Zofio, whose Art Nouveau style incorporated smartphone-compatible gramophones, trombone-shaped chandeliers and musical notation within bathroom tiles. Parts and Labor Design simultaneously reconstructed the lobby around velvet seating and a 40-foot monolithic stained-glass wall while developing three restaurant environments for chef Jonathan Benno through dark woods, green and white marble, brass and stained glass. Benno, formerly chef de cuisine at Thomas Keller's Per Se and later executive chef at Lincoln Ristorante, initially anchored the culinary program through Leonelli Taberna, Leonelli Focacceria e Pasticceria and the fine-dining restaurant Benno, giving the 1905 property a major contemporary gastronomic chapter during its 2018 reinvention.
Restaurateur Nick Hatsatouris began another culinary chapter in December 2023 with The Tusk Bar before opening BRASS in September 2024 with chef-partners Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra, the duo behind Contra and Wildair whose earlier work earned MICHELIN recognition on the Lower East Side. Islyn Studio designed both environments as connected expressions of New York dining history, giving The Tusk Bar marble surfaces and a 1920s apartment sensibility while shaping BRASS around French New Wave references, geometric murals, a central antique piano and a 70-seat dining room. Stone and von Hauske developed BRASS beyond a conventional brasserie template through dishes including crab and maitake tartlets, steelhead trout with smoked trout roe, pork shoulder à la moutarde and a deboned Amish chicken roulade wrapped in skin and filled with sausage, herbs and truffle mousseline. Nick Hatsatouris, Jeremiah Stone, Fabián von Hauske Valtierra and Islyn Studio consequently created a second authored restaurant era inside The Evelyn, reconnecting live piano, cocktails and ambitious dining with a building whose earliest character developed beside the songwriting rooms of Tin Pan Alley.
How to fold The Evelyn into your trip.
The Evelyn works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the collecting, artistic experimentation and creative institutions that developed around NoMad and Gramercy.
Begin at Museum of Sex, which opened on 5th Avenue on October 5, 2002 with NYCSEX: How New York Transformed Sex in America, establishing an institution devoted to the history and cultural significance of human sexuality with an advisory network that included scholars Steven Heller, Timothy J. Gilfoyle and Mike Wallace. Continue to National Arts Club, founded in 1898 by New York Times literary and art critic Charles De Kay with artists and patrons including Louis Comfort Tiffany and Charles Rollison Lamb before moving in 1906 into the Samuel Tilden Mansion on Gramercy Park, where members later included Robert Henri, Frederic Remington, Cecilia Beaux, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Alfred Stieglitz. Conclude amid the former Tin Pan Alley blocks of West 28th Street, where concentrations of publishers and songwriters helped turn commercially produced popular song into a defining American cultural industry associated with figures including Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. The progression moves from an institution examining New York's social boundaries through an artists' club built around creative exchange into the songwriting district that directly shaped The Evelyn's own cultural memory, reconstructing the unusually fertile world of art, performance and popular culture surrounding East 27th Street.
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