New Yorker Hotel

Recently we took an Untapped Cities "behind the scenes" tour of the New Yorker Hotel. The New Yorker Hotel was built in 1929 on 34th Street and 8th Avenue. It's 43-stories tall, 1-million square feet and has 1,083 rooms. The hotel is an Art Deco gem, with an enormous and iconic marquee sign that can be seen from miles away. I actually stayed at the New Yorker once when I visited the city with my friends years ago, but on this tour we got to see parts of the hotel usually off-limits to visitors.

One of the first places that we visited was the sky lounge and the rooftop. I'm not really afraid of heights but being 43-stories above the city on a windy, cold night was as scary as it was thrilling. The sign is crazy big when you're right next to it, and the different perspective was really fascinating. I think I could live here my entire life and still be wowed by the skyline—even Madison Square Garden manages to look charming from above.

We also got to explore the lower levels of the hotel, including remnants of the original DC power plant. When it was built, the hotel was powered by coal-fired steam boilers and generators in what was then the largest private power plant in the US—it was later modernized to AC power in the 60s, and now sits abandoned.

The best part of the tour, however, was seeing the entrance to a tunnel that once connected the hotel to the subway and Penn Station. The tunnel is blocked off now—and the New Yorker is now rebranded as a Wyndham hotel—but in my dreams I would be able to traverse the tunnel and magically emerge on the other side into the original Pennsylvania Station.