301 Park Avenue, opened 1 October 1931 — a 47-storey Art Deco building by Schultze and Weaver, 625 feet and 2,200 rooms, the largest and tallest hotel in the world until Moscow’s Hotel Ukraina passed it in 1957. It is the second hotel of the name. The first was two hotels built side by side by feuding cousins — William Waldorf Astor’s Waldorf of 1893 and John Jacob Astor IV’s taller Astoria of 1897 — joined by a 300-foot marble corridor and demolished in 1929 to make room for the Empire State Building.
The house
The name was bought for a dollar. Investors including the New York Central Railroad developed the air rights above the Grand Central rail yards and took the block between Park, Lexington, 49th and 50th; the Waldorf-Astoria name came with the deal for one dollar, and 1,416 rooms opened in 1931, no two of them identical.
A preview on 30 September 1931 drew a reported 25,000 people to a three-hour reception; President Hoover spoke by radio from Washington and called the hotel an exhibition of courage and confidence to the whole nation. It opened the next day with 500 guests, in the third year of the Depression, and did not fill for a decade. Hoover then lived in the Waldorf Towers from 1932 to 1964.
Conrad Hilton acquired it in 1949, calling it the greatest of them all; it was not profitable at the time. Landmarked outside in 1993 and inside in 2017. Owned by the Chinese Dajia Insurance Group — formerly Anbang — it closed in 2017 and reopened in 2025 after an eight-year restoration, with the room count cut from 1,416 to 375 and the rest converted to condominiums.
What distinguishes it
Two hotels built out of a family quarrel. William Waldorf Astor built the Waldorf in 1893 on the site of his own mansion; his cousin John Jacob Astor IV built a taller Astoria next door in 1897 in deliberate one-upmanship. The truce produced Peacock Alley, a 300-foot marble corridor between them, and the compound name.
The name cost a dollar. Bought from the Astor estate by the investors who built the Park Avenue house. The most valuable hotel name in America changed hands for one dollar.
It opened into the Depression and stayed empty for ten years. 25,000 people came to the preview; 500 came to the opening. Occupancy did not substantially improve until the 1940s.
The firsts belong to the first house, not this one. Electricity on every floor, en-suite baths and 24-hour room service are claimed for the Waldorf-Astoria of 1893–1929 ⚑ and the register attributes them there rather than to the 1931 building.
It became 375 rooms from 1,416. The 2017–25 restoration converted most of the hotel to condominiums. The largest hotel in the world became a mid-sized one inside its own walls.
A guest looking for the Waldorf of the mid-century — the vast lobby traffic, the two thousand rooms, the sense of a city within a building — will not find it. What reopened in 2025 is a much smaller hotel inside a preserved Art Deco shell, with most of the floors now privately owned apartments.
Signature rooms and dates
Competitive landscape
Editorial note — The 1893 and 1897 Astor hotels, Peacock Alley, the 1929 demolition, the dollar purchase of the name, the 1 October 1931 opening, Schultze and Weaver, the 47 storeys and 625 feet, Hoover’s radio address and residence, the Hilton acquisition of 1949, the 1957 loss of the height record, the 1993 and 2017 landmark designations and the 2017–25 closure and conversion checked against Wikipedia, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report and corporate material; verified August 2026. ⚑ The claims to the first electricity on every floor, first en-suite baths and first 24-hour room service belong to the 1893 house and are recorded there.
Sources
What the entry rests on. Each reference records the specific facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.