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Historic hotels often hold some of the most varied and colorful histories of any city building. So what stories are hidden in a New York lodging that has been a sailor's dormitory and a shelter for runaways? You're listening to Tall Stories on Monocle production book to you by the team behind the Urbanist. I'm Andrew Tuck. In this episode, Paul Logothetis takes us to the Maritime Hotel in Manhattan.
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When the Maritime Hotel opened its doors on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood in 1968, New York City was at the center of great prosperity for seamen. The building was one of a slew design and built by the architect Albert Lender for the National Maritime Union during the. During the 1960s when ports in Hoboken and Jersey City were bustling, the Maritime Union had built its national headquarters on 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village and soon realized they needed dormitories for the visiting sailors, leading to the building of what would become eventually the Maritime Hotel. It was one of three attention getting buildings Ledner, who was born in the Bronx but grew up in New Orleans, designed for the Union here in New York City. Iconic for its porthole windows that evoke a large seafaring vessel, the New York Times wrote. Ledner was derided for his unusual brash white structure whose creative angles and shapely design and unusual circles stood out like a vessel at sea in Manhattan's never ending concrete expanse. Lender's vision came at a time when modernist architects were tapping into collective transport for inspiration, with the overlooked liner getting some serious attention in terms of the
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form of the building, the massing of the building and of course the portal windows. That was absolutely intentional on Albert Lender's part to evoke aspects of. It's not quite an ocean liner that would be perhaps a little too glamorous, but certainly a kind of large working vessel. And you know, it's important to note that he certainly was not the first architect to do that. Now he had a reason for doing that, given that these buildings had been commissioned by the National Maritime Union, but much earlier, kind of 30 years earlier, a first generation of modernist architects in France in particular had begun to look at ocean liners as a reference point for modern architecture because they saw something that could be a model for a new kind of architecture in the 20th century, what came to be known as modernism. I'm Gabrielle Esperdy, I'm an architectural and urban historian who've taught at the New Jersey Institute of Technology for a number of years and I'm currently serving as dean of the Hillyer College of Architecture and Design at njit.
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The present day interior of the Maritime has undergone major transformation since its original concept. Its interior resembles something out of a Wes Anderson film, thanks to the faithful recreation of a sea vessel experience. But within four walls, colorful blue rugs lead you down hallways marked by darkly stained wood to cabin like rooms from a ship. A visit into its basement feels like a trip into the bowels of a steamliner. Quirky it is, but it hasn't always been looked at in that this is
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also a period that saw the construction of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim. And so if you think about that kind of modernist architecture going up in the city at the moment, you can see them as very much in a kind of conversation, if you will. What's distinctive about them? Hey, they were built at a time when the neighborhoods were changing. These were kind of low rise tenement blocks that got torn down for these large scale buildings to be put up. So in that sense, they represented the constant churn of real estate and buildings in the city. When we look at them now, we see them as much more. Yes, they were a bit quirky because of the porthole windows. They also became known in the city because of subsequent occupation. In the case of the Maritime Hotel, after the union sold it, it was occupied for probably about 20 years by Covenant House, which did amazing outreach programs to unhoused youth, but then went in a blaze of scandal and then they were abandoned for a while.
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The building was at the center of the 1980s AIDS epidemic when St. Vincent's Hospital moved in to use it as a facility. The Chinese government eventually took it over for some time as a study center before it became the Maritime Hotel.
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Adaptive reuse is always better than tearing something down, especially as we evaluate it now in 2026, we recognize that, as they say, the most sustainable building is the one that already exists. And so if these quirky buildings can find a second life or a third life, then absolutely, one could have argued when Covenant House could have moved out of these buildings. They just sat there kind of like white elephants until such a moment when Kelsey was sufficiently gentrified for there to be second life. We did it as a hotel. So when the union sold them, if you had said someone, yeah, yeah, we're going to convert these into a hotel in West Chelsea, they would have thought you were crazy. But then, of course, by the time planning is underway for the Maritime, the High Line isn't open yet, but it is already well under planning stages. And everyone knows that West Chelsea is going to just pop, and that's what happened over the next 20 years.
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That certainly is the case with the famed A Lister restaurant downstairs that caters to the likes of Taylor Swift, Jay Z and Selena Gomez. And across the street is the Chelsea Market, where throngs of visitors move past the building, unaware of its symbolic notoriety.
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Tolstories is a Monocle production from the team behind the Urbanist. This episode was written by Paul Locothetis and produced and edited by David Stevens. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes every week. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening. City Lovers.