Hotel McAlpin/Herald Towers

Now a condominium named the Herald Towers, this building was formerly the famous McAlpin Hotel.

My father used to tell me stories of coming down to NYC from Albany on business trips during the depression and filling himself up on the elaborate hors d'oeuvres the hotel offered during its happy hour.

To quote Wikipedia:

Construction of the Hotel McAlpin neared completion by the end of 1912 so that the hotel had an open house on 29 December. The largest hotel in the world at the time, The New York Times commented that it was so tall at 25 stories that it “seems isolated from other buildings”^[2] Boasting a staff of 1,500, the hotel could accommodate 2,500 guests. It was built at a cost of $13.5 million (nearly 300 million in 1997 dollars). The top floor had a Turkish bath and there were two gender-specific floors; women checking into the hotel could reserve a room on the women's only floor and bypass the lobby and check in directly at their own floor. One floor, dubbed the “sleepy 16th” was designed for night workers so that it was kept quiet during the day.