New York Marriott Marquis Hotel (New York City, New York)

 hotel, skyscraper, interesting place, movie / film / TV location, 1985_construction

574-foot, 49-story brutalist-style hotel completed in 1985. Designed by John Portman, it was originally conceived in the 1970s for the Westin hotel company, but construction required the demolition of numerous historic theaters and the resulting legal battles with preservationists meant that the building was not completed until 1985. By that point, Westin had withdrawn from the project, replaced by Marriott.

The hotel was the beginning of a concerted effort to revitalize the theater district and make it a tourist center. Encompassing the full east half of the block, it features an external electronic billboard and a 37-story atrium lobby filled with trees, plants, retail shops, and restaurants. A similar and more ornate atrium was created for Portman's Marriott Marquis in Atlanta.

12 pill-shaped glass elevators, Portman's trademark, transport guests to the 35 levels of guest rooms and to the revolving rooftop restaurant and lounge from the 7th-floor lobby. The first six levels of the hotel offer facilities for conventions and community events, including the city’s largest ballroom and its own 1,600-seat Broadway legitimate theater, the Marquis, on the 3rd level. This hotel has 1,946 rooms and suites, four restaurants, three lounges, and a coffee shop, including The View, a revolving rooftop restaurant. The View is the third highest restaurant in New York City behind ONE Dine on the 101st floor of One World Trade Center, and the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

The building's form takes the shape of two slabs on the north and south, clad in ribbed concrete panels, enclosing a recessed central section of dark-tinted glass, the bottom of which consists of an 8-story cylinder projecting from the facade. Above, there are six distinct 6-story sections either recessed or projecting, and gradually receding toward the top of the building, all sandwiched between the concrete slabs. The projecting sections have rounded glass tops.

At the base, the ground floor is lined with modern storefronts along the avenue, above which there is a new 6-story video board that spans the full blockfront and partway on the north and south sides. The video board replaces multiple levels of signage and smaller video boards, which were added beginning in the early 2000s, and cuts across the lower levels of the glass cylinder, leaving only the top projecting outward. On 45th & 46th Streets, the ground floor has two open air corridors running below the tower, leading to the hotel's main entrances. Between those two passageways are open-air vehicle driveways leading to the underground parking garage. There is grey granite cladding at the west end of the south facade, with loading docks at the far end. The entrance to the Marquis Theatre is near the west end of the north facade on 46th Street. Above the ground floor, the north and south facades have long strips of double-height recessed openings with large windows, with beveled bottom edges. There are similar 1-story recessed strips at the top floor of the base. The outer-facing walls of the slabs have ribbon bands of dark-tinted windows on each floor above the base.

The narrow east and west ends of the concrete slabs both have a single vertical strip of windows. The tree-lined interior atrium's center is filled by a round cylinder rising all the way to the top, around which the glass elevators are placed. The Marriott is topped by a three-story glass box containing The View restaurant.

The ground floor retail spaces along the avenue are occupied by Swatch watches, Levi's jeans, Invicta watches, Sephora cosmetics, and a T-Mobile wireless store. The interior was used as a filming location for S3E5 of the HBO original series "Succession" as the location of the Waystar Royco shareholder meeting. The ballroom, Broadway lounge and one of the upper-floor suites were utilized.