Luxury Hotel Planned for Rockefeller Center

The adaptive reuse bug has bitten one of the most iconic buildings in New York City.

Tishman Speyer has unveiled plans for a luxury hotel that will repurpose 10 floors of 30 Rockefeller Center on top of NBC’s studios and Radio City Music Hall.

Aspen Hospitality, a co-owner of the office property and a subsidiary of the Chicago-based Crown family, is planning to build a 130-key Little Nell Hotel in the space above the studios where Saturday Night Live and the Today show are broadcast, the Wall Street Journal reported.

This will be the second Little Nell luxury lodging outlet. The first, a 92-room hotel in—you guess it, Aspen—charges $1,800 per night.

The plan for the new hotel could be a test of the special permitting process for new hotels NYC established in the middle of the pandemic when the hotel industry in the Big Apple was being clobbered.

The special permitting process was enacted at the end of 2021 after proponents argued it would prevent an “oversaturation” of hotels in Manhattan. Opponents argued that the bill would have a chilling effect on the hotel industry; in terms of new construction, they were right: no applications were filed in 2022.

Aspen Hospitality is aiming to open the new Little Nell in three years. The project will first need to be approved by NYC’s Department of City Planning, the Planning Commission and the City Council.

According to Tishman, the office portion of Rockefeller Center is 93% leased, by like most of the office buildings in the city, the landmark is only bustling with office workers on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Meanwhile, a nasty street fight is breaking out in another iconic Manhattan location—Times Square—over SL Green’s proposal to put a casino in the Crossroads of the World.

In October, a partnership of Caesars Entertainment, SL Green and rapper-entrepreneur Jay-Z put in a bid to redevelop 1515 Broadway into a casino that will be designed to include a new Broadway theater that will be home to The Lion King.

The bid has drawn support from numerous restaurants and hotels in the neighborhood, who formed an umbrella group calling itself the Coalition for a Better Times Square.

Lining up in opposition is group called No Times Square Casino Community Coalition, which is being funded by the powerful Broadway League trade association.

The League’s coalition is claiming that a casino would harm “the local character” of Times Square and keep tourists from an area that is perennially one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world.

We won’t pick a winner here, but we’ll note that the Crossroads of the World probably lost its “local character” when they took down the White Owl sign blowing smoke rings, Ratso Rizzo died in Midnight Cowboy, Ed Koch pasted three-story-high neon signs on a bunch of new glass towers that siphoned off foot traffic and Rudy Giuliani shut down all the peep shows.

Memo to Broadway League: nothing short of a meteorite the size of Perth Amboy or a pandemic will keep tourists out of Times Square. The pandemic, we all hope, is over.