A Peacock’s-Eye View of the Waldorf Remade

Waldorf Astoria New York, one of the city’s grandest hotels, closed for renovations in 2017. After almost eight years and billions of dollars, it returns, reborn for the 21st century.

Share full article

373

By Julie Satow Visuals by Thea Traff

July 14, 2025

A Peacock’s-Eye View of the Waldorf Remade

Waldorf Astoria New York, one of the city’s grandest hotels, closed for renovations in 2017. After almost eight years and billions of dollars, it returns, reborn for the 21st century.

By Julie Satow Visuals by Thea Traff

July 14, 2025

Share full article

373

New York is a city filled with grand hotels, including the Plaza, the St. Regis and the Carlyle. But for nearly a decade, perhaps its most famous hotel, the Waldorf Astoria, home of Peacock Alley and a namesake salad of fruit and nuts, has been shuttered, its Art Deco facade obscured behind green plywood scaffolding.

Now, following an ownership change, a pandemic and a painstaking renovation, the hotel is about to open its doors to guests.

“The Waldorf has always been a reflection of New York,” said David Freeland, a historian and the author of “American Hotel: The Waldorf-Astoria and the Making of a Century.” “I’d like to think that its reopening symbolizes the return of a great public space within the life of the city.”

A 1956 dinner dance for the Royal Danish Ballet in the Grand Ballroom.

Sam Falk/The New York Times

First constructed as two hotels, the Waldorf and the Astoria, on adjoining lots just below 34th Street on Fifth Avenue, the hotel closed in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building. A few months later — and just days before that year’s Wall Street crash — the owners struck a deal to move to its current location, a full block between 49th Street and 50th Street, from Park Avenue to Lexington Avenue.

In 1931, the Waldorf-Astoria (the hotel dropped the hyphen in 2009) reopened as a 47-story limestone skyscraper with twin decorative copper spires and nearly 2,000 rooms, each outfitted with a speaker on which guests could listen to goings-on in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom, where Frank Sinatra sang, Albert Einstein spoke and the gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell held elaborate parties. At one, the April in Paris Ball, door prizes included a full-length mink coat and a diamond necklace, and Ms. Maxwell made her entrance on the back of an elephant.

From top left: Jesse Owens (1954), Frank Sinatra (1946), Marilyn Monroe (1957), Queen Mother Elizabeth (1954), Barbra Streisand (1964), Eartha Kitt (1978), Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen (1988).

Archival credits from top left: Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press, Associated Press, Getty Images, John Lent/Associated Press, Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press, Ira Schwarz/Associated Press and Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images.

The hotelier Conrad Hilton long aspired to own the Waldorf-Astoria, calling it “the greatest of them all,” and in 1972, his company acquired the property.

In 2014, Hilton sold it to the Chinese firm Anbang Insurance Group for $1.95 billion, still the most expensive hotel sale in history. Hilton retained a 100-year contract to continue managing it.

In 2017, Anbang closed the aging hotel to refurbish it and convert the upper floors into condominiums. In 2020, however, after being accused by the Chinese government of economic crimes, Anbang declared bankruptcy and the property was transferred to Dajia Insurance Group, also a Chinese firm, and the parent company of Chicago-based Strategic Hotels & Resorts, a luxury hotel group.

Just 62,000 square feet of the 1.6-million-square-foot building is officially landmarked by New York City and much of the rest of the building has been reimagined in what Andre Zotoff, the chief executive of Strategic Hotels & Resorts, characterizes as a multibillion-dollar investment.

Inside, New Yorkers and visitors will find many of the Waldorf’s most notable mainstays gleaming and refreshed. Other details are new but reflect the intentions of the original architects, Schultze & Weaver, who could not execute them, stymied by cost or technical limitations. Here, a tour of the highlights.

Park Avenue Lobby

Walking through the filigreed bronze and metal doors of the hotel’s Park Avenue entrance, and up the grand staircase, guests will find the “Wheel of Life” marble floor mosaic, made from 148,000 pieces of stone, by the French artist Louis Rigal, now scrubbed to gleaming, its figures depicting the stages of life from birth until death. The artist also painted the series of murals that form the frieze along the walls.

The architects from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which oversaw the renovation, spent years plumbing the Schultze & Weaver archives, and cross-referencing them with thousands of old photographs and colorized postcards. One archival photo of the lobby ceiling suggested it had been altered since the hotel was built. The original specifications called for a backlit luminous marble panel in the center, said Frank Mahan, a principal at S.O.M. His team recreated this detail by using a thinly cut marble slab lit from above, “creating indirect, soft, even mysterious, lighting that the original architects had intended,” said Mr. Mahan.

The hotel reacquired two decorative silver urns by E.F. Caldwell & Company that were featured in the original lobby, fitted with lights to help illuminate the ceiling.

Peacock Alley

Peacock Alley, which originally referred to the corridor that connected the Waldorf and the Astoria hotels on Fifth Avenue and was named for the guests who would promenade in their fashionable attire, has been largely restored to its 1931 design. Gone are modern iterations, like walls of blue enamel and columns in the shape of gold palm fronds that were décor from the 1980s, replaced by walls covered in maple burl wood panels and columns clad in black marble.

The Waldorf clock, commissioned by Queen Victoria for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and a feature of the hotel since its first days on 34th Street, has been immaculately cleaned.

For nearly a year, a metalsmith, a clockmaker and four conservators worked to restore the clock, which is made from walnut, mahogany, marble and copper, methodically documenting more than 100 elements of it. They cleaned, stripped, rebuilt and repaired every inch, regilding and resilvering the mechanisms before reassembling it.

Cole Porter’s grand piano also has a spot in the lobby. The composer, who lived at the Waldorf-Astoria for three decades until his death in 1964, received the Steinway, which he named High Society, as a gift from the hotel, and reportedly used it to write many of his hit songs, including “Anything Goes,” “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Cocktails have a long history at the Waldorf, and the bar at the original hotel on Fifth Avenue was a popular gathering place, before it was removed at the start of Prohibition. There were many famed Waldorf bartenders, including Johnnie Solon,who is credited with inventing the Bronx Cocktail, a mix of two-thirds gin, one-third orange juice, and a dash of both Italian and French vermouths. The current iteration of the hotel’s bar features a wall covering that shows birds against a shimmering gold background.

“By the time the hotel closed, the main lobby was very dark and very busy,” said Mr. Mahan. “Now, we have re-established the symmetry of the openings on all four sides; at the north there is a bar that is recessed, and at the south we have removed the reception desks and placed them into a new space, a more intimately scaled reception area called the Library Lounge.”

In the Library Lounge, hotel employees welcoming guests will be wearing new uniforms by the British designer Nicholas Oakwell, with silver silk blazers and waistcoats for the women and Prince of Wales check three-piece suits for the men. Guests can now enter from a porte cochere on 49th Street, enabling them to bypass Park Avenue traffic and head directly to the door where employees can collect their luggage and valet park their cars. Guests can then proceed directly to the Library Lounge via a staircase.

Silver Corridor

The Silver Corridor, on the third floor, connects event spaces including the Grand Ballroom, the Astor Room and the Basildon Room. Inspired by the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Silver Corridor is a panoply of metalwork, inlaid mirrors and murals — one of the few elements aside from the Waldorf clock that were on display at the hotel’s original location.

The corridor features a series of 18 piers made from harewood, which has an unusual gray-silver tint, above which are murals by the American painter Edward Emerson Simmons, with imagery representing the 12 months and four seasons. During the recent renovations, conservationists discovered that parts of the murals were not as dark as the rest of the imagery and inferred that when the paintings were relocated from the first Waldorf-Astoria they were too small and must have been painted larger to fit the bays.

The hotel’s new managing director, Luigi Romaniello, joins a long line of Waldorf managers, most famously Lucius Boomer, who ran the Park Avenue hotel from its inception until his death in 1947, and Oscar Tschirky, better known as Oscar of the Waldorf, who is credited with popularizing the Waldorf salad, Thousand Island dressing and eggs Benedict.

“When I was contacted by the Waldorf, the job was everything I ever wanted,” said Mr. Romaniello, who joined more than a year ago from the Plaza. “A hotel that is bigger than life that means so much to so many people.”

When the hotel closed in 2017, it had more than 1,400 rooms. There are now just 375, with 372 privately owned condominiums on the floors above. The interiors, designed by Pierre-Yves Rochon, have an average ceiling height of eight or nine feet, with most exceeding 570 square feet; the smallest room measures twice the size of the original hotel rooms. Room rates start at $1,500 a night.

The rooms feature separate dressing areas and most also have bar areas, and all the building’s windows, some 5,600 of them, are new, many framed with side mirrors that create an illusion of greater space and light. “The hotel used to have 3,000 guests when it was fully occupied,” said Mr. Romaniello. “But now that there are fewer rooms, we can offer a much more elegant, elevated experience.”

Grand Ballroom

The Grand Ballroom, the site of the first Tony Awards and where J.F.K. supposedly met Marilyn Monroe, is also newly gleaming. The rounded balcony boxes where crowds celebrated New Year’s Eve dancing to Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadianssparkle with silver leaf, while the noise and vibrations that once made it impossible to rent out rooms on the surrounding floors during big events have been reduced with an array of acoustic isolators — essentially enormous rubber pads inserted below the room’s columns and at the beams.

Gone is the enormous crystal chandelier that once hung from the ballroom’s 44-foot ceiling, covering, and damaging, decorative panels of plaster and metalwork. Indirect lighting emanating from three light coves hidden in the ceiling now casts an atmospheric glow. “The lighting of the ballroom never quite worked the way it was intended,” said Mr. Mahan, who, along with the design team, discovered the light coves in the original drawings and presumes they were never completed because of technical difficulties.

Share full article

373

Share full article

373