Waldorf Astoria New York

The Waldorf Astoria New York is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Schultze & Weaver, and built between 1929 and 1931 in New York, NY.

Its precise street address is 301 Park Avenue , New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Waldorf Astoria New York is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New York and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Waldorf Astoria New York was officially declared as a national landmark on January 5^th 1993.

At the time of its completion in 1931 the Waldorf Astoria New York incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included an underground tunnel, known as track 61, which allowed VIP personalities, such as presidents, to arrive to the hotel directly by train without having to face the press or crowds at the hotel's entrance.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1990 and 2022.

Schultze & Weaver was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Waldorf Astoria New York can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Waldorf Astoria New York 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 Waldorf Astoria New York 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 "Gray Waldorf" limestone combined with light-colored bricks and bronze ornamentations at the entrances.

Other materials found at the Waldorf Astoria New York include, terracotta, was used in ornamental blocks, nickel, found combined with bronze at the entrance doors and grilles, wood panels, used to cover the lobby walls combined with red marble plilasters, oak, used in the elevators paneling in combination with Carpathian elm , and marble, seen in different colors on floors and walls throughout the hotel.