JW Marriott Essex House

The JW Marriott Essex House is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Frank Grad & Sons, and built between 1929 and 1931 in New York, NY.

JW Marriott Essex House is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Essex House until 1931.
• Marriott's Essex House between 1969 and 1985.
• Essex House-A Westing Hotel between 1999 and 2006.
• Jumeirah Essex House between 2006 and 2012.

Its precise street address is 160 Central Park South, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1991, 2006 and 2023.

Frank Grad & Sons was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Otis as the company in charge of the elevators system.

The JW Marriott Essex House can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The JW Marriott Essex House was completed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The JW Marriott Essex House uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features limestone plates up to the third floor, and beige-colored bricks from there on until the end of the building. The main entrance has some limestone ornaments above it, and is protected by a canopy that was made using bronze frames, the same material as the main door frames. The building has a six-story-high red neon sign at the top of the building reading ESSEX HOUSE, which has always made the building stand out in postcards of Central Park's skyline and has become an icon of the city of New York.