FOUND Study Turtle Bay (New York City, New York)

 dormitory, Romanesque (architecture), 1923_construction

387-foot, 35-story Romanesque-revival hotel completed in 1923 for James T. Lee. Designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon of the firm of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, it opened as a residential hotel named the Shelton Hotel, later to be named Shelton Towers, then the Halloran House Hotel, and now the New York Marriott East Side. It was originally built as a men’s residence with 1,200 bedrooms plus library, lounge, and athletic facilities. The Shelton Hotel is considered the first building to successfully embody the massing requirements of the 1916 Zoning Law, and it became a model for subsequent setback skyscraper buildings. It was the tallest hotel in the world upon completion and was such a striking presence on the New York skyline that it inspired a series of masterful paintings by artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

At its base, the Shelton is basically square in plan, except for a 15-story, 40-foot-wide wing that extends through the block to East 48th Street. At the 3rd floor the main building sets back at the rear into a U-plan with a long center light court facing eastward. The other facades have shallower recessed light courts framed by pavilions. There are additional setbacks at the 15th, 21st, and 31st floors, with a hipped-roofed penthouse capping the tower. All of the building’s street facades are faced with limestone at the 1st and 2nd floors. The Lexington Avenue and 49th Street facades incorporate 2-story arcades. The upper stories are clad with multi-hued greyish-brown bricks trimmed with limestone and terra-cotta. The design features alternating projecting and recessed bays, decorative brick projections arranged both in files to provide vertical accents and in random patterns, arched corbel tables inspired by medieval machicolations, and details (including sculpture) loosely drawn from North Italian Early Christian, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance sources. A large, curved, glass marquee has been added to the Lexington Avenue entrance loggia.

On the west facade along Lexington Avenue the base's central arcaded entrance loggia has unfluted Corinthian columns resting on high plinths ornamented with lion heads and capped by impost blocks decorated with relief figures of athletes and readers, molded archivolts, gargoyles. A cornice rest on corbels, and there is a parapet with decorative mask reliefs. The three main entrances have surrounds decorated with Renaissance arabesques. There are arched niches between the entrance bays, arched double-light 2nd-story windows, and rectangular window openings at the ground floor of the corner pavilions. There is a projecting, granite entrance surround at the south end of the south pavilion, and a square mezzanine window with iron grille above the south entrance. At the 2nd floor the corner pavilions have rectangular windows and central arched double-light window openings with stone balconies resting on console brackets beneath the arched windows and inset relief panels decorated with wreaths and scrolls above rectangular windows of outer bays; molded cornices resting on corbels are decorated with flowers and masks.

At the 3rd-14th floors the corner pavilions' window bays are set off by files of projecting bricks, capped by arched corbel tables and parapets decorated with diamond inlay. The center section of façade articulated with alternating projecting and recessed bays, ornamented with projecting brick. The 14th floor terminates with sections of arched corbel tables including rounded projections over the recessed bays. The 15th-20th floors have cabled colonettes and angled projections at corners of façade, with alternating projecting and recessed window bays. There are brick-and-glass enclosures and pergolas on 15th-story terraces above pavilions, and arched windows with stone trefoil transoms alternating with square-headed windows at the 15th floor. Between the 15th & 16th floors are circular terra-cotta plaques with rosettes, chevron moldings, and corbels, and an arched corbel tables decorates the parapet above the 20th floor.

The 21st-30th floors have alternating recessed and projecting bays with smaller window openings in the recessed bays; arched corbel tables cap the recessed bays. The corners set off by cabled colonettes topped by angled griffins. The 31st floor -- a double-height story -- has recessed bays lit by giant arched windows, and projected bays decorated with files of projected bricks. The end bays are pierced by small attic windows. Gargoyles project from the three center bays, there are decorative panels on the parapet over the recessed bays, and bear-like grotesques carrying amphorae mark the roof line.

The north facade on 49th Street repeats the basic articulation of the west facade, with a recessed arcade in place of the loggia; the arcade is enriched with decorative panels of colored stone laid in a chevron pattern set beneath 2nd-floor windows. The base of the eastern pavilion housing service areas of hotel incorporates a mezzanine level, with square-headed windows, and stone balustrades with quatrefoil tracery at the 2nd floor.

The 48th-Street (south) facade and wing occupies the entire width of the lot only at the 1st & 2nd floors, setting back to the east above the 2nd floor at the front of the wing and above the ground floor at the rear to form a light court. To the east of the wing there was a narrow vacant lot that is now a public plaza. A 1-story plus mezzanine extension projects from the south wall of the main building into the court. The basic articulation of the south wing matches other facades except at the base, where it has has multi-hued limestone cladding. At the ground floor there is a quadripartite window with stone mullions, tracery, decorative stone lunette, and an arched drip molding. It is flanked by paired , narrow, arched windows with stone tracery on the right, and a metal service door on the left. At the 2nd floor quadripartite and paired arcades set off projected sill and lintel moldings. Windows are set back into the façade to form balconies. Above are gargoyles, a chevron frieze, and a simple stone cornice resting on block corbels. The upper floors match the treatment of the corner pavilions on other facades. At the 15th-floor roof terrace of the wing, there is a parapet wall coped with limestone, a brick pavilion with tiled hipped roof at the south end of the roof; and a hipped-roofed porch entry to a solarium.

The rear (east) facade is visible at street level from Third Avenue and 49th Street. It is organized into three sections consisting of two outer wings and a recessed light court, which contains a massive chimney. A bridge connects the two wings at the 15th floor. Other historic bridges have been removed, replaced by metal trusses.

Although the Shelton Hotel initially only allowed men, it opened it doors to women only months after it was completed. The Shelton seems to have been especially popular with young artists and designers and attracted a number of people connected with the theater and movies. Some notable residents included Humphrey Bogart, Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband Alfred Stieglitz, and Tennessee Williams.

In August 1926, the Shelton was the site of a spectacular stunt by the magician Harry Houdini who set a world record by remaining sealed in an airtight casket at the bottom of the hotel’s pool for one hour and 31 minutes. The Shelton Hotel changed hands in 1935 and was placed under the control of the Knott Management Corporation. In 1946, the company, which had been merely managing the Shelton, purchased the hotel. Knott converted some of the 15th-story public spaces to offices and was highly successful in leasing the hotel’s meeting and dining rooms to trade groups for business meetings. The Knott Corporation sold the Shelton in 1951, after which it then changed hands several times, before being acquired by the Fink Hotel Group in 1954. The hotel continued to operate through the 1960s but was increasingly regarded as passé. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Shelton was acquired by Goldman and DiLorenzo and its leasehold transferred to Tishman, Arlen Realty and Stanley Stahl, who assembled the rest of the block with the intention of demolishing everything and building a massive new structure for a corporate client. By the mid-1970s the hotel had been emptied except for a few rent-controlled tenants who resisted eviction.

In 1977 a consortium headed by developer Edward J. (Biff) Halloran and hotelier Norman Groh gained an operating lease of the building through the Howard Johnson company, hiring architect Stephen B. Jacobs to begin restoring the exterior of the building and undertaking a gut renovation of the interior to bring the hotel rooms up to modern standards. The Halloran House opened for business just after Thanksgiving in 1978. The Howard Johnson Company had been acquired by the Marriott Corporation in 1985 and with another multi-million dollar renovation completed in December 1990 the hotel was placed under Marriott management and renamed the Marriott East Side Hotel. The present metal and glass marquee at the entrance loggia was installed in 2000. The hotel now contains 646 guest rooms. Besides the lobby, the ground floor was occupied by 525 Lex restaurant and lounge.

The hotel permanently closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was converted to student dormitories in 2023.

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