Met Life Tower to become hotel

The Met Life tower has finally gone the way of the rest of Met Life in Manhattan and will become a hotel, it is said.

One internet article sums it up this way:

Tommy Hilfiger no longer owns his eponymous clothing brand—though he still is the principal designer—so now he's spreading out into non-clothing directions. First up? A hotel in the MetLife Clock Tower off Madison Square. Hilfiger and his partners are thisclose to buying the building at the foot of Madison Avenue—at 700" feet it was the tallest building in the world from 1909-1913—for $170 million dollars.

Hilfiger, who sold his company for $4 billion (and just opened a pop-up store in the Meatpacking District), has reportedly been shopping around for a place to open his, presumably preppy, new hotel for a while now. Other spots he looked at included the old Times building to the Chelsea Hotel.

Turning the MetLife Clock Tower, a gorgeous office building that riffs on the Campanile in Venice, into a hotel is just one of many options the building has faced in the past decade. Before the recession hit it was supposed to become a high-end condo building with interiors designed by Versace. At another point Ian Shrager and RFR Holdings were looking to do their own condo conversion in the building. It is unclear how many rooms the Hilfiger Hotel (or whatever it is called) will have but a smaller condo conversion for the building is not out of the question, sources tell the Journal.