A Cheap Shot

The Hilton New York, in 1963, when it was brand new:

We’re looking northwest, and the street in the foreground right is Sixth Avenue. The building visible just to the right of the Hilton with the roof signage is the Essex House, facing Central Park. The Hilton’s narrow vertical slab contains the guest rooms (obviously), the wide low slab contains conference rooms.

Per the Wikipedia entry, this is the largest hotel in the city – not much of a surprise, as I’ve been to a couple of conferences there and it is huge – and was originally supposed to have been designed by Morris Lapidus, who had to withdraw because of a conflict of interest. It’s too bad, because Lapidus, while not to everyone’s taste, had a way of humanizing huge hotels that this building could have used.

The cheap shot, from a critique of the hotel’s design written more than 40 years ago, is that it looks like a giant vending machine; as if putting a quarter in the top would result in a giant chocolate bar shooting out at the bottom across Sixth Avenue. I have not walked past the hotel, since reading that line, and not had a pleasant moment picturing that occurrence.