It was designed in the Renaissance Revival style and has housed such figures as Jackie Gleason, Mae West, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who kept a suite there from 1950 to 1953.

Anchoring the west half is 1740 Broadway, a 26-story, 375-foot (114 m) skyscraper formerly owned by Mutual of New York, with a weather beacon[3] as well as an imposing façade.

It is infamous as the site of the assassination of mobster Albert Anastasia, which took place on October 25, 1957, in the hotel's barber shop.

[8] Earlier, in 1928, the Jewish gangster and well-dressed prototype of the modern don, Arnold Rothstein, was shot and fatally wounded inside one of the suites.

[9] The silent-film actor Roscoe Arbuckle died in 1933 from a heart attack in his sleep in his suite in the hotel.