It was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and built by William R. H. Martin, who headed the Rogers Peet business, in a French Renaissance style.

The welfare hotel gained a negative reputation across the U.S. and was the setting for Jonathan Kozol's 1988 study, Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America.

The southern bank of elevators has three shafts and adjoins stair A, which connects the first basement to the eighteenth floor and has marble treads, a cast-iron balustrade, and a wooden handrail.

[36] There was also a "Dutch room"[36] with terracotta floors, hand-carved wainscoting on the walls, and murals depicting "quaint and picturesque Holland scenes".

[37][38] The cafe contained walls of light-colored, artificial stone, and its ceiling was treated in the Italian Renaissance style, ornamented in low relief.

[21][39] There were eight gold panels, which contained three-quarter length, life-size depictions of four men and four women, painted by Irving Wiles and Carroll Beckwith.

[47] The foyer was decorated in the Louis XIV style, with carved, dark oak woodwork and walls completely covered in period tapestries.

In general, the second-floor corridors and the conference rooms lack their original decorations and have carpeted floors, plasterboard ceilings, and walls with wallpaper and dadoes.

[47] In 2006, the hotel had 14,000 square feet (1,300 m2) of convention space, which included a grand ballroom, an executive boardroom, and breakout rooms.

[59] The Real Estate Record and Guide wrote in April 1899 that "the Martinique has a waiting list of 65 names, and that at least one suite of two rooms and bath, rented at $500, has been sublet at $1,200".

[72] Hardenbergh filed plans for the second annex in October 1907,[25][73] and the Rogers Peet store moved to the first three stories of the Marbridge Building.

[74] The firm of Moran and Jones designed 388 rooms in the new annex,[75] which also included an enlarged main entrance and various public spaces on the lowest stories.

[45] In the 1910s, the hotel housed some long-term residents, such as physician Cornelia A. Walker and former New York deputy attorney general Job E.

[77] T. Coleman du Pont of the Greeley Square Company, which operated the neighboring McAlpin Hotel, bought the Martinique from the Martin family in October 1919.

[86][87] The Pennsylvania Drug Company leased a storefront on the southern side of the ground story the same year, within the space originally occupied by the dining room.

[52] Harry F. Young, a climber who was scaling the hotel for a film, fell nine stories to his death in 1923,[89] prompting the New York City Council to ban "street exhibitions of a foolhardy character in climbing the outer walks of buildings by human beings".

[91] The 56 East 59th Street Corporation, led by Louis Markel, bought the hotel from the Greeley Square Company that November.

[19] In August 1930, the media reported that a Chicago-based department store was considering paying $9 million for the Martinique and neighboring structures, then redeveloping the site.

[20][94] However, two companies signed long-term leases for storefronts in the hotel the following month, preventing the department store's development for the time being.

[123] Over the years, the hotel typically housed families who could not be assigned to shelters in their own boroughs due to overcrowding,[124] as well as those displaced by fire.

"[126] The reverend of the nearby Church of St. Francis of Assisi said in 1974 that the hotel housed 300 families, along with 175 "discharges from mental hospitals, addicts, and alcoholics".

[120] The Washington Post estimated in 1987 that one-sixth of the city's 12,000 homeless children lived at the Martinique, even though the hotel lacked basic facilities such as kitchens in each room.

[135] In 1986, Manhattan Community Board 5 provided funding to convert the hotel's former ballroom (which had been used as storage space since 1956) into a play area for the children who were housed there.

[136] Around the same time, state officials received complaints that families at the Martinique occupied "cramped, subdivided rooms without bathrooms [or] furniture".

[137] The city government ultimately fined the hotel's owners in 1988 after finding that the guest rooms had been divided into cubicles of as small as 9 by 12 feet (2.7 by 3.7 m).

[138][123] The hotel lacked in-room telephones, heat, running water, or elevator service, and the facade had become extremely shabby.

[139] After the administration of U.S. president Ronald Reagan threatened to withdraw $70 million in federal funding, in 1988, mayor Ed Koch announced that he would close 46 welfare hotels within two years.

[125] The developer Harold Thurman leased the building from Seasons Affiliates for 99 years in 1989, with plans to reopen the Martinique Hotel as a franchise of the Days Inn chain.

[146] In 1996, Thurman announced plans to operate the shuttered Martinique as a 530-room Holiday Inn hotel as part of a franchise agreement.

In addition, a bistro and a supper club opened within the hotel, supplementing a cafe and an Asian restaurant that already operated within the Martinique.