The Hyatt Regency Times Square (formerly the Crowne Plaza Times Square Manhattan) is a hotel at 1605 Broadway, between 48th and 49th Streets, in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. The hotel is operated by third-party franchisee Highgate. The 795-room hotel was designed by Alan Lapidus and is tall with 46 floors. The facade was designed in glass and pink granite, with a arch facing Broadway. The hotel was designed to comply with city regulations that required deep setbacks at the base, as well as large illuminated signs. In addition to the hotel rooms themselves, the hotel contains ground-story retail space, nine stories of office space, and a 159-space parking garage. The hotel's tenants include the American Management Association, and Learning Tree International; in addition, New York Sports Club was a former tenant.
Developer William Zeckendorf Jr. bought the hotel's site in 1985 and subsequently razed the existing structures there. Construction commenced in 1988, and the hotel opened on December 1, 1989, as the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza Manhattan. For the first several years of the hotel's operation, its office space and exterior signage was empty. Adam Tihany redesigned the interior in 1999. The City Investment Fund, a joint venture between Morgan Stanley Real Estate and Fisher Brothers, bought the hotel in 2006 and renovated it again two years later. Vornado Realty Trust then acquired majority ownership of the hotel in 2015. The hotel closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City and reopened in 2022. It closed again around January 2025 and reopened as a Hyatt Regency in July 2025.
Site The hotel occupies the eastern end of the city block bounded by Eighth Avenue to the west, 49th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, and 48th Street to the south. It is one block north of Times Square in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. The mostly trapezoidal land lot covers , with a frontage of on Broadway and a depth of . The surrounding area is part of Manhattan's Theater District and contains many Broadway theatres. Nearby buildings include the St. Malachy Roman Catholic Church to the northwest; The Theater Center, Brill Building, and Ambassador Theatre to the north; 750 Seventh Avenue to the northeast; 1585 Broadway to the south; and the Longacre Theatre, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, and Samuel J. Friedman Theatre to the southwest.
Historically, the site had contained Churchill's Restaurant, which had been built in 1910 and redesigned as a theater in 1937. The theater later became an adult movie theater called the Pussycat Cinema. Just prior to the hotel's construction, the site had contained six pornographic businesses owned by Michael Zaffarano, including the Pussycat Cinema and the Kitty Kat and Mardi Gras Topless Disco. The Pussycat had contained a large neon sign; David W. Dunlap of The New York Times described the sign as an "exuberant cynosure of a naughtier, gaudier, vanishing Broadway". There had also been some "pinball and souvenir shops" on the site. Songwriter Irving Berlin had once also occupied a building on the site, as the offices of Irving Berlin Inc. had been at 1607 Broadway between 1921 and 1933.
Architecture
The hotel was designed by Alan J. Lapidus, son of modernist architect Morris Lapidus. The hotel is with 46 floors. In addition to the 795-key hotel, the building contains of ground-story retail space, of office space, and a 159-space parking garage. The American Management Association's Executive Conference Center, is on the sixth through eighth floors with a total of . Learning Tree International and the New York Sports Club also had space .
Facade The facade was designed with glass and pink granite. Most of the facade is clad in reflective glass. The southeast and northeast corners are covered with granite, concealing the elevator shafts inside. The center of the Broadway facade contains a granite arch measuring tall. According to Lapidus, he wanted the arch's design to evoke the design of Wurlitzer organs from the 1930s and 1940s. The New York Times compared the hotel to a "giant jukebox".
The hotel was designed to comply with city regulations that required deep setbacks at the base, as well as large illuminated signs. Accordingly, the hotel rooms are deeply set back from Broadway, and the first seven stories were initially planned to contain curving signs. Lapidus wanted to include holographic displays, laser lighting displays, and waterfalls in the hotel's design. At the time of the hotel's construction, light meter technology was not advanced enough to determine how much light these features emitted, so Lapidus left provisions so these features could be installed later. As built, the hotel had large billboards on its first 12 stories to comply with the regulations. At the time of the hotel's opening, these signs had an annual maintenance cost of $100,000. In 1995, a sign measuring was installed on the southern wall.
Features When the hotel was being built, it was variously cited as containing 765, 770, 778, 780, or 785 rooms. A 1992 news article cited the hotel as having 770 rooms and 25 suites. The top four floors were known as the Crowne Plaza Club, which charged an additional fee. Following a renovation in 2008, the 46th story was turned into a "butler floor" with 16 rooms; the floor was so named because guests were given complimentary services such as laundry and private transportation. In addition, the 128 rooms on the 41st through 45th floors were collectively labeled the "concierge levels".
At ground level, escalators led to a lobby and reception area on the second floor. The lobby area connected to a lounge and three restaurants. Holiday Inn originally reserved six floors for business patrons, who would pay an additional fee for extra services such as complimentary breakfast. To attract guests, each suite was designed with technologically advanced amenities of the time, such as modem connections and phone lines, as well as bathrooms clad with marble. In addition, there was a fitness center originally covering . The fitness center included a swimming pool measuring long. The fitness center was expanded to two floors in 1992. Following a renovation in 2008, the New York Sports Club started to operate the fitness center.
The building was designed with approximately of office space on nine of the lower stories. The office space was placed on the 6th through 14th floors, with hotel rooms above and below. When it opened, the hotel had a business center with computers, stock quote machines, fax machines, and a secretarial service. The hotel also had a ballroom and over 20 conference rooms, which covered . By 2015, the ballroom could be rented as workspace.
History Times Square's Theater District had evolved into a business district after World War II. Nonetheless, there were relatively few large developments there in the mid-20th century. Between 1958 and 1983, only twelve buildings with at least of space were developed in the 114-block area between Sixth Avenue, Times Square, Eighth Avenue, and Columbus Circle. By the 1980s, there was high demand for office space in New York City. During the decade, several hotels were developed around Times Square, as well as in New York City in general, as a result of growing tourism. These hotel developments were spurred by the success of the nearby New York Marriott Marquis, which had an occupancy rate of over 80 percent across nearly 2,000 rooms. In addition, the city government had enacted a zoning bonus in 1982 for large new buildings in West Midtown, but the bonus was scheduled to expire in 1988.
Development
The block of Broadway between 48th and 49th Streets was owned by Michael Zaffarano, who for years resisted selling off his pornographic businesses, even as other landlords nearby were being cajoled to shutter their adult businesses. Zaffarano's son John inherited the sites in 1981 and was more agreeable to selling them after his father's death. Developer William Zeckendorf Jr. bought the sites in 1985 and planned to replace them with a hotel. The site had also been contemplated as a location for an office building. In August 1986, Zeckendorf announced plans for the hotel, to be designed by Alan Lapidus. The hotel was variously planned to be 44, 45, or 46 stories tall. At the time, the New York City Planning Commission (CPC) was considering enacting regulations that would have forced new buildings along Times Square's northern section to include bright signage as well as deep setbacks. Accordingly, Zeckendorf planned a hotel with five types of signs, including a horizontal zipper and five-story-high displays. Zeckendorf demolished the pornographic businesses in October 1986 and developed the hotel with several partners.
The Holiday Corporation (later Holiday Inn) agreed to operate the hotel in October 1986, and the hotel became known as the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza Times Square. It was to be the Holiday Corporation's first hotel in Manhattan and would be the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza chain's flagship. The hotel building was planned with of space, of which about would be reserved for offices. Zeckendorf received $227 million in financing for the hotel in August 1987, with the Bank of Nova Scotia providing the loan. The CPC approved a planning regulation that September, which required large new developments in Times Square to set aside about five percent of their space for "entertainment uses", such as broadcast studios or ground-floor stores. The ordinance also required the developers of such buildings to install large signs facing Times Square. The hotel's design was directly influenced by this ordinance.
When construction started in 1988, the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza was one of four large new office projects being erected around Times Square, as well as the largest of four hotels being erected there. By that July, the hotel's superstructure was up to the fourth story. The Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza planned to charge a minimum of $175 per night for a single room, making it more expensive than its competitors nearby. Nonetheless, Holiday Inn projected that the hotel would be profitable because the company already had a large number of frequent guests and business clients. The hotel was primarily targeted toward domestic business travelers, followed by international business clients and then leisure visitors. As such, management planned to set aside 20 percent of its rooms for business clients, twice as much as in comparable hotels. By 1989, the number of annual visitors to New York City had decreased for the first time in eight years due to the effects of Black Monday. Nonetheless, the hotel's manager Michael Silberstein expressed optimism that the decline was temporary. Prior to the hotel's opening, Silberstein sent some of the hotel's employees to Walt Disney World for training, saying that "Disney gives top-level service".
Opening and early years