The New York Marriott Marquis is a Marriott hotel on Times Square, in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S. Designed by architect John C. Portman Jr., the hotel is at 1535 Broadway, between 45th and 46th Streets. It has 1,971 rooms and of meeting space.
The hotel has two wings, one on 45th Street and one on 46th Street, connected by a podium at ground level. The first two stories contain retail space, while the Marquis Theatre occupies the building's third story. The hotel's atrium lobby, including meeting space and restaurants, is located on the eighth level. Thirty-six stories of guestrooms rise above the lobby, overlooking it. The top three stories contain The View, one of New York City's highest restaurants, which revolves for a 360° view of the city. The hotel architecture features a freestanding concrete elevator core, with twelve glass elevator cabs on its exterior.
Construction began in 1982, following significant delays and extensive controversy concerning the destruction of historic theaters on the site. The hotel opened September 3, 1985, and has since undergone several renovations and modifications. By the late 1990s, the hotel was one of the most profitable in the Marriott chain. After securing all ownership stakes in 1993, Marriott acquired the underlying site in 2013.
Site The New York Marriott Marquis is on the west side of Broadway, along Times Square between 45th Street (George Abbott Way) to the south and 46th Street to the north, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. The New York City Department of City Planning gives the address as 1535 Broadway. The land lot is irregularly shaped and covers , with a frontage of on Broadway and a depth of . The Broadway frontage runs diagonally to the 45th and 46th Street frontages. The northern end of the hotel faces Duffy Square.
The sidewalk in front of Broadway was slightly widened when the hotel was built in the 1980s. The widened sidewalk was known as Broadway Plaza. As originally proposed, it would have been a pedestrian mall extending across the roadbed of Broadway eastward to Seventh Avenue. M. Paul Friedberg had designed a plaza with benches and barriers, but the plan was ultimately scrapped. In the 2010s, the sidewalk was further widened, and the adjoining roadbed was converted into a permanent pedestrian plaza with benches. The expanded plaza measures long and extends the curb line eastward to Seventh Avenue.
The surrounding area is part of Manhattan's Theater District and contains many Broadway theaters. On the same block are the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Music Box Theatre, and Imperial Theatre to the west. Other nearby buildings include the Paramount Hotel to the northwest; the Hotel Edison and Lunt-Fontanne Theatre to the north; TSX Broadway, the Palace and Embassy, theaters, and the I. Miller Building to the northeast; 1540 Broadway to the east; 1530 Broadway to the southeast; One Astor Plaza to the south; and the Booth, Gerald Schoenfeld, Bernard B. Jacobs, and John Golden theaters to the southwest. Historically, the Marriott's site was occupied by five theaters: the original Helen Hayes, Morosco, Bijou, Astor, and Gaiety (later Victoria), all built in the early 20th century.
Architecture The New York Marriott Marquis was designed by John C. Portman Jr. and is operated by Marriott International. It is part of the Marriott Marquis brand of hotels, a joint venture between Marriott and Portman. The hotel building has 51 stories and two basements, rising to a height of . While there had been rumors that the elevators serve a 55th floor, Marriott states that the top floor number in the hotel is 49, which is used as office space. According to Host Hotels & Resorts, the hotel's owner, the hotel has 1,966 rooms and of meeting space.
Form and façade
The 1973 plans for the hotel called for two rectangular wings, one on 45th Street and one on 46th Street, connected by a twelve-story podium. Five-story sections of guest rooms were to be recessed between these wings, with each section alternating in depth. The modern hotel is similar to what was originally planned, but the podium is eight stories tall. Above the base of the hotel, in the middle of the Broadway façade, a curving drum sits atop the Marriott marquee. The rectangular wings on 45th and 46th Street contain open terraces on the eighth story, which face Times Square and Broadway. The wings are each deep and are connected by a truss measuring long.
The façade is made of gray precast concrete panels with vertical stripes, which were manufactured by Canadian company Prefac-Vibrek. The lower stories' panels were installed using cranes, while the upper stories' panels were installed with a monorail assembly. The precast panels are hung from steel beams that are placed around the hotel building's perimeter. Some openings were also made in the façade so exterior signs could be attached to it. The windows are recessed deeply into the concrete panels, a design similar to a Venetian blind.
Signs On Broadway, the base of the façade originally had four signs. The largest measured and was placed at the center of the Broadway façade, while the other signs measured .
The central sign on Broadway was known as the Kodarama and was originally used by Kodak to display color photos, which were changed several times per year and were accompanied by a caption sign measuring . The photos were printed on large Duratrans strips, which were double-laminated on the front to protect against weather and wind. The Kodak photos were framed by a large display box and were cooled by a vacuum system behind the box. The signs were largely supported on beams that protruded from the façade. The Kodak sign was enlarged in 1999 to a display measuring . The enlarged display was divided into three parts: the primary display on the bottom, a Jumbotron in the upper right corner, and a tertiary display on the upper left corner. The Kodarama, along with the Coca-Cola sign, were the only signs along Times Square in the mid-1980s that were sponsored by major companies.
In 2014, a new electronic sign was installed on the Broadway façade, spanning the whole length of the block and wrapping around to 45th and 46th Streets. The screen, made by Mitsubishi Electric, measures and has 24 million pixels. The new screen covers and is made of interlocking panels measuring . The preexisting framing was extended and reinforced to support the newer sign, and a Vierendeel truss was installed across the center of the Broadway façade.
Structural features The foundation is on high-quality rock and uses spread footings capable of . The site was excavated to a depth of . The hotel originally had two basement levels, but the first basement level was demolished in the 2010s, creating one basement level with a double-height ceiling. When the basement was modified, a steel frame was built adjacent to the foundation wall.
The superstructure of the hotel consists of of steel, manufactured by the Mosher Steel Company. Some of the steel beams measured as much as long and weighed up to apiece. As the steel was erected, a layer of minerals bonded with cement was sprayed onto the steel members, providing fireproofing. The columns are placed about behind the façade, and horizontal beams are cantilevered outward from the columns to support the exterior signs. Weidlinger Associates was the structural engineer but, after the hotel was completed, it was reinforced with additional steel framing from Burgess Steel. The second story of the hotel was removed in the 2010s, creating a double-height space on the ground story. The ground-story columns were reinforced with plates, and the depth of some beams was reduced by up to .
On the first ten stories, the floor decks consist of concrete poured over sheets of corrugated metal. The guestroom floors above are made of concrete panels, which weigh about each. They measure wide, long, and thick. According to an engineer, the precast slabs provided not only a finished ceiling (as opposed to a bare surface) but also lateral stability. The floor decks contain standard steel trusses at some location, as well as Vierendeel trusses that carry some of the hotel rooms across the width of the atrium. The structural steel is entirely encased inside floor slabs and walls, which allows light to pass into the central atrium.
The freestanding elevator core is made of concrete and is rounded in shape. It was manufactured by Collavino Brothers. The core measures wide and carries twelve passenger elevators on its exterior, as well as four elevators at the center. The exterior elevators are surrounded by glass and overlook the atrium lobby. The cabs are enclosed by glass and have fiber-optic lighting. The elevator system, supplied by Schindler, has a destination dispatch system, which assigns passengers to elevator cars according to their destination floors. The destination-dispatch system was completed in 2006 and modernized in 2019. Six additional elevators are used by service staff.
Interior
Base
Under normal zoning regulations, the maximum floor area ratio (FAR) for any building on the hotel's site was 15. During the hotel's planning, the FAR received two bonuses of 20 percent each, bringing the FAR to 21.6. The developers had to include privately owned public space at the building's base for the first bonus, and they built a new theater (the Marquis Theatre) for the second bonus. The privately operated public space consists of two passageways between 45th and 46th Streets. The passageway on the eastern side of the site contains a driveway, which was designed with five vehicular lanes and was intended to divert taxi traffic away from Broadway. To the west is a pedestrian walkway, which functions as an northward extension of Shubert Alley and was proposed as early as 1970. Both the driveway and the Shubert Alley Extension have doors that lead to an indoor pedestrian area.
The ground and second stories were designed with of retail space, though the second story was demolished in the 2010s. In the original plans, the retail space would have spanned seven stories at the base, and a ninth-story terrace was to have enclosed the retail space. The seven-story retail mall was part of the floor-area bonus for the hotel, but it was omitted in the final plan. While of public space was to have been provided in exchange for the floor-area bonus, a 2000 study by the Municipal Art Society could not locate the additional space. Ernest P. Gathwaite, a professor at York College of the City University of New York, designed six landscape murals for the hotel, each measuring wide.
The Marquis Theatre is on the building's third floor. In exchange for including the theater, the hotel was given a bonus of nearly . As a stipulation of the bonus, the New York City Board of Estimate specified that there had to be 1,500 seats in the theater. The stage is immediately above the hotel driveway, and the ballroom is above the theater's ceiling. The third through seventh stories contain theater offices, as well as additional meeting rooms.
Atrium lobby