Why you should experience The New York EDITION in New York, NY.
The New York EDITION is a commanding luxury hotel where Madison Square's skyscraper ambition, Gilded Age grandeur, contemporary design culture and metropolitan glamour converge inside one of the buildings that first made vertical New York astonishing.
Set along Madison Avenue near East 24th Street and just steps from Madison Square Park, the hotel occupies the 1909 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, designed by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons after Venice's Campanile di San Marco and crowned by four enormous clock faces above the park. Ian Schrager and Rockwell Group preserved original dark wood and architectural fabric while introducing Venetian plaster, a 30-foot hand-forged blackened-steel fireplace and a sculptural staircase conceived as a contemporary response to the great houses of Millionaire's Row. Upstairs, oak floors, walnut headboards and restrained residential interiors deliberately quiet the drama of the tower itself. The result is a hotel where Schrager's private-house philosophy inhabits an early skyscraper whose architecture helped establish Madison Square as a proving ground for New York's vertical imagination.
What you should know about The New York EDITION.
The New York EDITION is best known for opening in May 2015 after Ian Schrager and Marriott International converted the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, completed in 1909 by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons as a 700-foot headquarters whose design drew directly from Venice's Campanile di San Marco. The tower became the world's tallest building upon completion and retained that distinction until 1913, while its four clock faces measured 26.5 feet in diameter, with 17-foot minute hands weighing 1,000 pounds and electrically synchronized through a master clock that also controlled 100 clocks throughout the Metropolitan Life complex. Schrager and Rockwell Group transformed the former corporate tower into a 273-room hotel, preserving original dark wood on the second floor while introducing a 30-foot hand-forged blackened-steel fireplace, Venetian plaster walls and a curving staircase that became sufficiently central to EDITION's design style that Schrager later reproduced it in Barcelona. Marriott sold the property to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority for $343 million shortly before opening, part of an $816 million transaction encompassing EDITION properties in New York, London and Miami Beach. The conversion joined two consequential chapters of hospitality and architectural history, placing Schrager's EDITION experiment inside a building that had already altered the trajectory of the Manhattan skyline more than a century earlier.
The Clocktower extended that reinvention into the Metropolitan Life executives' former second-floor offices, where Rockwell Group organized chef Jason Atherton's restaurant as five interconnected rooms lined with original dark wood, mahogany paneling, three fireplaces, velvet seating and dense arrangements of framed photography. Atherton arrived in New York after building an international career that included working with Pierre Koffmann, Marco Pierre White and Ferran Adrià before leading Gordon Ramsay's Maze and establishing his own restaurant group, giving the hotel a culinary author with a distinctly international trajectory. Schrager's broader residential thesis continued upstairs through a dozen room types shaped around the irregularities of the historic floor plates, while the highest accommodations exploit the clocktower's unusual elevation and orientation for sweeping perspectives across Madison Square Park and Manhattan. The Clocktower's inherited executive rooms, Atherton's culinary authorship, Rockwell Group's preservation strategy and Schrager's residential minimalism collectively turned the former insurance headquarters into a hospitality project where the building's corporate past remained active material.
How to fold The New York EDITION into your trip.
The New York EDITION works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the architectural ambition, artistic patronage and cultivated interiors that developed around Madison Square and Gramercy Park.
Begin at Appellate Division Courthouse, where James Brown Lord completed his marble Renaissance Revival composition in 1899 with an astonishing decorative program involving 16 sculptors and ten muralists, establishing Madison Square as a setting where architecture and fine art were conceived together. Continue to Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site, where Theodate Pope Riddle reconstructed Roosevelt's demolished childhood home in 1923 using original and family-provided furnishings, restoring the domestic setting where the future president lived from his 1858 birth until age 14. Conclude at National Arts Club, founded in 1898 by New York Times literary and art critic Charles De Kay and housed since 1906 inside the conjoined Samuel Tilden mansions, where nineteenth-century domestic architecture became a permanent gathering place for artists, writers and patrons. The progression moves from an extraordinary synthesis of sculpture and architecture through Roosevelt's reconstructed private world into a mansion devoted to creative exchange, revealing the culture of ambitious buildings and cultivated interiors that makes The New York EDITION's own architectural reinvention feel native to Madison Square.
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