Roosevelt Hotel
45 East 45th Street | also 70 Vanderbilt Avenue, 42 East 46th Street, 46 East 46th Street | Midtown | built 1924
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1924
The 19-story Roosevelt Hotel opens above Grand Central's tracks
The 19-story Roosevelt Hotel opens on September 22, 1924, named for Theodore Roosevelt and developed by the New York Central and New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads. William Stone Post of George B. Post & Son designs it with an Italian Renaissance Revival facade, and it costs $12 million to build. The structure stands mostly over the underground tracks of Grand Central Terminal, and a basement passageway once linked the hotel to the terminal.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1925
A bronze Ding Darling cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt is unveiled in the lobby before his relatives
On December 8, 1925, several hundred guests, many from the Roosevelt family, gathered in the main lobby to see a bronze reproduction of J. N. "Ding" Darling's cartoon "Long, Long Trail" unveiled. The piece, about four and a half by six feet, showed the late president in Rough Rider dress waving farewell as he heads into the sky. The hotel, which had opened the year before, was named in his memory.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1925
Hugo Gernsback starts radio station WRNY on the hotel's 18th floor
Hugo Gernsback launches WRNY in June 1925, broadcasting from a room on the 18th floor of the Roosevelt, where its transmitter is first located. The transmitter moves to the roof in 1926. In August 1929 it shifts to New Jersey, and the station's studios leave for 57th Street a month later.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1929
Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians open a three-decade run in the Roosevelt Grill
Guy Lombardo's orchestra first played the Roosevelt Grill on October 3, 1929, and kept returning for about thirty years. The music was piped by radio into guest rooms, and the band's New Year's Eve broadcast, which ended with "Auld Lang Syne," became a national ritual. Bandleader Lawrence Welk got his start there by sitting in during the summers, when the Royal Canadians left to play on Long Island.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1931
Lindbergh, Byrd and Earhart dine at the Roosevelt to thank a Weather Bureau forecaster
On April 9, 1931, a roomful of transatlantic fliers, among them Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Amelia Earhart, Clarence Chamberlin and Bernt Balchen, dined at the hotel to honor Dr. James H. Kimball of the Weather Bureau's New York office. The Times credited him as the man most responsible for the success of their flights. Lowell Thomas was toastmaster, and a message from President Hoover was read to the guests.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1931
A robber snatches the hotel's $5,000 payroll and slips past every watchman
Around 2:30 p.m. on July 31, 1931, cashier Mary Gilmartin, 27, was carrying the day's payroll in a tin box from the second-floor paymaster's office to the main-floor cashier when a young man waiting in the corridor attacked her and ran down the fire stairs with the roughly $5,000. The stairs led to passageways under Vanderbilt Avenue and the main entrance and to an employee exit on 46th Street, and he got past every watchman. Detectives suspected he had once worked at the hotel.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1933
The Roosevelt plans a costume ball to bury Prohibition
As repeal neared in late 1933, the hotel announced a costume "repeal ball" featuring a mock "Funeral of Old Man Prohibition." The Times reported on December 5 that more than 1,200 reservations had already been taken. At midnight, twelve models were to sound a trumpet reveille and a casket would be opened, releasing a female figure meant to stand for the returning spirit of Bacchus.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1934
The $12 million hotel goes into receivership and a $25,000 bid wins it
The Depression drained the Roosevelt, and management had spent a while denying that the hotel was in trouble. In 1934 the rumors became fact: the hotel entered receivership, and the courts approved a bid of just $25,000 for a building that had cost $12 million to put up. The end of Prohibition, which the hotel had celebrated a few months earlier, had come too late to save it.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1944
Thomas Dewey runs his campaigns and governor's office from Roosevelt suites
From 1943 to 1954 the state kept an office at the Roosevelt for Governor Thomas E. Dewey, whose suites ran from 1525 to 1531. His 1944 presidential campaign was headquartered on the tenth floor, and in 1948 he, his family and staff followed the election returns from his fifteenth-floor suite. After leaving office in 1954 he still stopped by the hotel barbershop every Tuesday until he died.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1947
The Roosevelt becomes the first U.S. hotel with permanent TVs in guest rooms
In November 1947 the Roosevelt installs television sets in forty rooms on its seventh, eighth and ninth floors, a first for any American hotel offering sets that stay in the room. The hotel had already opened in 1924 with several novel features, including a child-care service and a rooftop dog kennel, the first at any New York hotel.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1971
China's delegation to the United Nations moves into the Roosevelt's 14th floor
In 1971 the delegation of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations took over the hotel's 14th floor, at a time when the Roosevelt's popularity had already begun to slip. The hotel was then run by Realty Hotels, a holding company jointly operated by the New Haven and New York Central railroads.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1976
The NFL Draft is held at the Roosevelt from 1976 to 1978
In the late 1970s the National Football League held its annual draft at the Roosevelt, in the years 1976 through 1978, when the event was still a low-profile affair. The hotel was already a regular stop for award ceremonies: the Peabody Awards were presented there in the 1940s, Columbia's Mike Berger Awards in journalism debuted there in 1961, and the George Polk Awards were given there by the 1970s.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1980
Fire destroys the hotel's Colonial Room
A fire in July 1980 destroys the Colonial Room, the Roosevelt's breakfast room. The hotel's interiors had been designed in an early American style, unlike its Italian Renaissance Revival exterior. Paul Milstein had bought the hotel in 1978 and leased it to Pakistan International Airlines the following year.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2023
The Roosevelt reopens as an intake center for asylum seekers after closing in the pandemic
The Roosevelt closes on December 18, 2020, when its owners cite continued financial losses tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. A welcome center opens there on May 15, 2023, along with the first 175 rooms of a city shelter for asylum seekers. The shelter closes on June 24, 2025, having housed more than 155,000 people from 150 countries.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2025
The Roosevelt's migrant intake center closes after 155,000 people pass through
Mayor Eric Adams announced in February 2025 that the shelter in the former hotel would close in June, and most staff were laid off the following month. The center closed on June 24, 2025, having sheltered more than 155,000 people from 150 countries. The Pakistani government then considered selling its stake in the hotel, and by February 2026 officials of the two countries had tentatively agreed that the site could be redeveloped.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- Roosevelt Hotel (Manhattan)Wikipedia
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