The hotel, opened in 1898, was designed by architecture firm Rossiter & Wright and developed by civil engineer Edward G. Bailey.

The upper stories originally featured 90 apartments, but these were replaced with 205 guestrooms when Philippe Starck and Gruzen Samton Steinglass Architects converted the Royalton to a boutique hotel in the 1980s.

A group including Philip Pilevsky, Arthur G. Cohen, Ian Schrager, and Steve Rubell bought the Royalton in 1985 and renovated it into a boutique hotel.

FelCor Lodging Trust bought the hotel from MHG in 2011 and resold it to Highgate Holding and the Rockpoint Group in 2017.

[8][9] Prior to the development of the Royalton Hotel, the neighborhood contained a slaughterhouse, stables for stagecoach horses, and a train yard for the elevated Sixth Avenue Line.

[4] During the mid-1980s, Philippe Starck and Gruzen Samton Steinglass Architects renovated the hotel,[13][15] and Brian McNally designed two ground-level restaurants.

[22] The lobby itself contained chairs in a variety of designs; glass-topped tables, some of which had chess boards; and decorations such as horse-shaped lamps.

[31] In the mid-1980s, the corridors leading to the guestrooms were darkened for dramatic effect;[2][25] as Starck explained, "before the opera starts, the place is dark.

[18] Generally, the rooms were decorated with "natural materials in neutral colors",[13] including mahogany, gray carpets, and slate.

[28] The furniture in each guestroom was designed to resemble animal body parts, such as tails, snake heads, or horns.

[55] Residents included actor Robert Benchley;[56] actresses Lucy Beaumont,[57] Muriel Starr,[58] and Catherine Doucet;[59] and theatrical critic George Jean Nathan.

[60] The hotel's tenants also included actor Marlon Brando[41] and playwrights Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams,[41] and Edward Peple.

[25] To hire staff for the hotel, Schrager ran advertisements in entertainment magazines such as Variety;[33] this attracted 2,000 candidates, who auditioned for 178 jobs.

[25] The developers also had to work around a holdout tenant, a retired tap dancer in her 60s who refused to relocate because the hotel was near Broadway.

[26] Pilevsky considered selling the hotels that he had co-owned with Rubell and Schrager, including Morgans, the Royalton, and the Paramount.

[28] During that decade, the Royalton hosted guests including Madonna and Weird Al Yankovic,[28] as well as Karl Lagerfeld, k.d.

[74] The hotel itself gained a reputation for aloof staff, small rooms, and unconventional furniture, which added to its appeal with some guests.

[12] After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Schrager used the Royalton to temporarily house displaced Lower Manhattan residents,[77] and he had to drastically reduce nightly room rates.

[85] MHG spent $1.5 million in 2010 to renovate the Brasserie 44 bar,[85] and the company hired several bartenders to overhaul the cocktail menu.

[95] The Royalton was temporarily closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, and it was sold again in September 2020 to MCR Investors, operator of the TWA Hotel, for $41 million.

[84][96] MCR planned to renovate the Royalton to make it less exclusive; the firm's chief executive Tyler Morse said that potential guests avoided the hotel since "it was too intimidating".

[97][98] A decade after the hotel opened, the Nashville Tennessean described the Royalton as having "a quite amazing variety of private and dining rooms".

[99] Prior to the hotel's 1980s renovations, it was described as looking "so seedy that the shabby gentility of the worn and faded Algonquin, directly across 44th Street, seemed appealing by contrast".

[25] A writer for the Hartford Courant said that "in form, the place is a modern design museum offering a virtuoso's show", although he also said that the Royalton had some practical shortcomings, such as the fact that the bathrooms were too small to fit two people.

[33] USA Today wrote that "what [the Royalton has] brought back to New York is lobby socializing, a staple of the '20s society.

"[102] A reviewer for The New York Times, writing in 2005, said: "If the bleeding edge is where your black-and-red Louis Vuitton yearns to rest, there are hotter spots than the slightly scuffed Royalton", although he said the hotel's ambience "never goes completely out of style".

[21] Two years later, Alice Rawsthorn wrote for the Times that Starck's lobby had been designed "as a metaphor for Manhattan, and the generations of immigrants who have settled there".

"[104] Interior Design magazine wrote: "Philippe Starck's handiwork, which lasted 19 years before workers began carting it away, may have been the most important hotel lobby of the late 20th century.

"[22] After the 2007 renovation, The New York Times said the hotel's restaurant was "anemic and empty" and wrote that, "if the Royalton was infamous for its gorgeous but bumbling staff, only the former part has changed".