The Mermaid Room was created as the hotel's cocktail bar and nightclub in the late 1940s. Irving Fields and his trio played there from 1950 to 1966.[4]
History
Park Central Hotel is located on the former site of the Van Corlear building, the first apartment hotel in New York City, designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and built in 1879. The Van Corlear was demolished in 1921 to make way for the Park Central Hotel.[5]
7th Avenue side
The hotel was built by Harry A. Lanzer and opened on June 12, 1927. Lanzer sold the hotel to Sheraton in 1948 and it became the Park-Sheraton Hotel.[4] Sheraton renamed it The New York Sheraton Hotel in 1972,[4] not to be confused with the later Sheraton New York Hotel. In 1983, Sheraton sold the hotel for $60 million[6] to V.M.S. Realty, which contracted with Dunfey Hotels to manage the hotel through their Omni Hotels division, and the hotel was renamed the Omni Park Central in January 1984.[7] The hotel was sold to developer Ian Bruce Eichner in 1995[4] and left the Omni chain, reverting to its original name, Park Central Hotel. Eichner converted half the hotel's 1,450 rooms into the Manhattan Club, a 266-unit, all-suite timeshare development located at the north side of the hotel at 200 West 56th Street.
It is infamous as the site of the assassination of mobster Albert Anastasia, which took place on October 25, 1957, in the hotel's barber shop.[8] Earlier, in 1928, the Jewish gangster and well-dressed prototype of the modern don, Arnold Rothstein, was shot and fatally wounded inside one of the suites.[9] The silent-film actor Roscoe Arbuckle died in 1933 from a heart attack in his sleep in his suite in the hotel.[10]
The hotel was the venue for the National Football League Draft from 1980 to 1985. Today, the Park Central is an independent hotel managed by Highgate Holdings.[11] The facade was renovated in 2007.[3]
