Royalton Hotel
Royalton Hotel is located just east of Times Square in Manhattan at 44 West 44th Street
The building was built in 1898 as the exclusive residential Hotel Royalton. Rossiter & Wright was the architecture firm commissioned, and the contractor was E. F. Dodson & Company. Its design was unusual because it was one of the first buildings to enable street-level passage from one block to the next. As originally designed, tenants had apartments overlooking 43rd or 44th Street, while servants lived in rooms overlooking the airshafts along the sides of the building.
Royalton was designed to mirror the 1920s concept of a hotel lobby. It was reopened as the Royalton Hotel on October 10, 1988. It was the first hotel designed by Philippe Starck.
One prominent resident of the Royalton was the humorist Robert Benchley.
Royalton is now part of the Highgate Hotel collection of hotels. During the summer of 2007, the Morgans Hotel Group decided to renovate the hotel to update the interior. The hotel reopened on October 1, 2007.
The hotel is mentioned in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
