It has been a decade of insults for the Waldorf Astoria.
Eight years ago, the Park Avenue colossus abruptly closed for renovations. The 1,413-room hotel had been sold to Anbang, a mysterious Chinese insurer. Once upon a time, allowing foreigners to own the Waldorf—a symbol of American luxury no less iconic than the martini—would have been inconceivable.
National pride aside, however, the hotel was also the home of American presidents when they visited New York, and thus it had a significant national-security role. It was also—or had been once—an essential part of New York City, an institution whose symbiosis with Midtown once seemed to pulse in tandem the way it does with the main branch of the New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal.
Yet when Anbang took it over, the city seemed to shrug. The hotel had become a symbol of flabby decadence. Rooms could be had for under $300 in 2016. Within months of its closing, a store opened a few blocks away on Second Avenue selling Waldorf doorknobs, ashtrays, and dinnerware at giveaway prices. It did not empty immediately.
By then, questions had arisen about the new owners. Anbang’s directors had taken desperate measures to hide their identity from the Chinese Communist Party, which was in the midst of a brutal crackdown on residents hiding money abroad, even executing some. A pair of enterprising New York Times reporters managed to unravel Anbang’s scheme, whereby its directors transferred ownership to relatives in rural Pingyang County. The Waldorf Astoria, it turned out, was owned in part by Chinese villagers.
Beijing was not pleased and assumed control of the hotel, while sentencing Anbang’s C.E.O. to a long prison term. (There may have also been concerns about Anbang’s financial stability.) Like many absentee landlords, the Chinese government was in no rush to move forward, slowing renovations further. This helped create a dead zone around the Waldorf, as the empty hotel’s immense shadow, combined with the pandemic, killed off neighboring businesses for blocks.
When the hotel reopens—the date, repeatedly postponed, has been set for this spring, although the Waldorf Web site is taking reservations now for September—it will find itself across the street from a pair of former hotels now housing college students.
The irony was that during the Waldorf’s slide into irrelevance, luxury hospitality, the industry whose idiom it practically invented, took off. Over the last decade, Americans have developed a fever for extremely expensive hotels. The travel industry has become obsessed with one mission: serve the desires of the ultra-wealthy. Glamorous, sceney hotels have returned to the spotlight, especially in big cities. “New York had a banner year in 2023,” says Zach Demuth, head of hotel research at commercial-real-estate investor Jones Lang LaSalle. “Two thousand and twenty-four was better.”
But where is the Waldorf Astoria? During the closure, rumors spread that the renovations, which were essentially converting half the hotel into apartments, had run into difficulties. The building, after all, is landmarked, inside and out. Early on, architects discovered that Conrad Hilton, who owned the Waldorf in the 50s and 60s, changed the property more than anyone knew, doing “things that were probably not up to code,” says Kenneth Lewis, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (S.O.M.), which led the overhaul.
“There was a thing in the 70s for cast ceramic bathtubs,” says Lewis. In order to create such fixtures for the Waldorf, Hilton’s engineers jackhammered holes through the floors and let the tubs dangle into the spaces underneath. “I remember going when we walked in, thinking, What the hell is that?” he says. “It looked like a pink cloud sticking into the floor below.”
The renovations were prolonged—and plagued by adversity, including the recent death of a construction worker—even for a property as big as the Waldorf. The owners haven’t said how much they put into it. “Official numbers are still under wraps, likely due to some other investment costs that haven’t made it into the equation yet,” says Albert Herrera, executive vice president of partner relations at Internova Travel Group.
There were also frequent management changes and labor issues. Some Waldorf workers reportedly took buyouts of around $150,000 back in 2017, while others waited nearly a decade for the hotel to reopen. And then there is the question of whether the city really needs another grand hotel converted into expensive, flashy and probably empty condos.
Nearly all of the city’s grand hotels—the Plaza, the Pierre, the Carlyle—have been converted into residences in recent decades, and the results are not beloved. As urbanist Kim Velsey wrote, “Hotels belong to the city in a way that condos do not.” Condominium conversions “capitalize on the magic of a grand hotel while simultaneously destroying it,” by isolating the very rich from everyone else.
This is not a minor concern for Hilton, which owns and operates Waldorf’s 32 hotels worldwide. “The Waldorf brand has frankly fallen off a cliff,” Demuth says. “The hope is that [the reopened hotel] will re-establish Waldorf as the pre-eminent luxury brand. This is supposed to be Hilton’s luxury flagship.”
“New York is iconic for them,” says Herrera. “That’s going to be where it stops and starts from a growth perspective.”
Recently the Waldorf began showing the renovations to journalists. “When you see them, you’ll understand why it took eight years,” says a publicist. She isn’t wrong. Even if S.O.M. had not done a spectacular job, any job would have been impressive. Touring the Waldorf is a reminder that New York contains so many pharaonic wonders that maybe people shrug a little too easily. The Waldorf was meant to be a city unto itself, and it is. As large as it looms from the outside, it feels too massive within to be contained by the Art Deco castle you see from Park Avenue. There are rooms the size of other hotels, including the Grand Ballroom, which can hold more than 1,000 people and is one of only 120 interior landmarks in New York.
Apparently guests used to complain about noise coming from the ballroom during events (in 2004, Prince played a guitar solo in the ballroom that “burned the stage to the ground”), so engineers severed the columns supporting its triple-tiered ceiling and inserted rubber suspensions. “The whole space now floats,” according to Frank Mahan, also a principal at S.O.M. It is these kinds of interventions that leap out, rather than the details of the transformation, which S.O.M. says it labored on, too, using “a phenomenal set of archives.” Mahan compares the entire project to the restoration of Grand Central back in the 1990s.
It remains to be seen whether the hotel will meaningfully connect with the surrounding neighborhood. When it was built, the Waldorf was meant to be both a landing place for high-spending out-of-towners and a gathering spot for locals. By the time it closed, it had the same moribund feel of Track 61, the hotel’s now ghostly underground railroad station, which was sometimes used for guests with their own railcars, and political figures.
One thing seems certain: no U.S. president will ever stay in the hotel again. “I can’t imagine why the United States would continue to let the president stay there,” says Anthony Cangelosi, a former Secret Service agent who is now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “You don’t know what could have been installed in these suites during the renovation. Why take the risk?”
In recent years, many heads of state, including President Biden in 2023, have stayed across 49th Street at the InterContinental New York Barclay, whose principal owner is Qatar. “We know that Obama, on his last visit, stayed at the Lotte New York Palace, which is Korean-owned,” says Herrera. “So it’s kind of like, Who do you want to sleep with?”
Ben Ryder Howe is a frequent contributor to New York magazine, The New York Times, and Air Mail. He is the author of My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store
