New York is about to lose the Hotel Pennsylvania. Demolition of the 103-year-old Beaux-Arts structure designed by McKim, Mead & White began last week in earnest.—Max Scott, “At NYC’s Hotel Pennsylvania, Interior Demolition Has Begun,” untapped new york
First it was the closing of the Roosevelt Hotel, where many comic book and science fiction conventions were held from the 1960s to the 1980s, as I reported back in December 2020. Now the time has come for another comic-con gathering place to meet its end: the Hotel Pennsylvania, located at Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street, on New York City’s West Side.
Opened in 1919, the 2,200-room Hotel Pennsylvania was designed as a companion piece to the Victorian-toned Pennsylvania Station right across the street—both designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. And despite its name changes over the deacdes—from the Hotel Statler to the Statler Hotel to the New York Statler to the Penta Hotel to the Ramada Hotel, and then back to the Hotel Pennsylvania—it was an impressive reminder of Old New York…at least from the outside. Inside, unfortunately, it didn’t look as awesome.
Now, the hotel’s current owner, Vornado Realty Trust, is in the process of tearing down the place. The interior is being gutted, to be followed by its Old New York exterior, to make way for a some modern “upgrade.” It’s all part of the Empire Station Complex, a plan put into play by former governor Andrew Cuomo to “revitalize” midtown Manhattan by tearing down all those dreadfully outdated buildings around Madison Square Garden—you can see what’s on the chopping block here.
I attended Fred Greenberg’s Great Eastern Conventions there in the early 1990s (back in the Ramada Hotel days); Big Apple Con and its offshoot, New York Comic Book Marketplace, on and off over the years; and one Wizard World. SWC’s last appearance at BAC was in 2016 (you can read my con report here). It used to be a good location, back when Great Eastern was using the ballrooms on the upper floors, but when Big Apple Con wound up downstairs in the dreaded Penn Plaza Pavilion, a crappy space that later became a short-lived sneaker store, it outright sucked, with all the support pillars making it impossible to see down an aisle to scope out exhibitors. BAC eventually packed its bags and moved over to the New Yorker hotel one block west in 2019, and that was the end of the Hotel Pennsylvania’s relationship with comic books.
So, farewell, Hotel Pennsylvania and the work of McKim, Mead & White. You had a good, long run, but in a city always willing to toss aside its history in favor of building shiny new things, it was only a matter of time before you joined the original, majestic Penn Station across the street (now the site of Madison Square Garden) in being replaced by yet another soulless New York “improvement.”
Thanks for the memories!
