Where you can still catch a glimpse of the glory of a vanished Grand Hotel

An absence rises from the sidewalk of Manhattan, a nothingness on Seventh Avenue that rises 22 stories into the Midtown sky. There is now vacancy on the site where Hotel Pennsylvania once stood.

The Ionic columns and limestone facade, the guest rooms, conference rooms and dining rooms are gone. The whistling doormen and busy bellhops, weekend vacationers and afternoon adulterers, the hucksters and show dogs and tipsy convention goers, all moving to the rhythm of a faint Big Band beat: history.

Demolition crews took away the last of the century-old hotel in late summer, leaving a void across from Pennsylvania Station that reflects either progress or shortsightedness. Its planned replacement will be a super-tall office tower for a city that doesn’t need more office space.

But if you know where to look — say, in a particular Hell’s Kitchen storefront — you might see a dazzling hint of what once filled that absence.

Hotel Pennsylvania opened in 1919 as the largest hotel in the world, with 2,000 rooms and a city of shops and amenities within its brown brick walls. Radio broadcasts of swinging Big Band music performed at the hotel proved to be a marketing genius, with even the hotel’s telephone number made famous by bandleader Glenn Miller’s 1940 hit “Pennsylvania 6-5000.”

But changes in travel and entertainment habits over the years forced the hotel to rent out space, and occasional reports of drugs, prostitution and bedbugs – the three curses of the hospitality industry – did little to broaden its appeal. Yet the hotel retained its sentimental appeal as the place where your parents honeymooned; where you spent your first night in the big city; where you meet up with friends.

When a real estate conglomerate, Vornado Realty Trust, became sole owner in the late 1990s, you didn’t have to be a Hilton to suspect that the Hotel Pennsylvania, despite its good bones and rich history, was doomed. Nostalgia rarely pays off.

Vornado closed the hotel during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and then announced the following year that it would demolish the building for an office tower only slightly shorter than an unamused neighbor, the Empire State Building.

In late 2021, the hotel’s owners signed a contract with a company called International Content Liquidations to sell a century’s worth of stuff. Frank Long, the president of the liquidation company, recalled the two central wishes of the owners: “They wanted as much money as they could get and they wanted the building emptied.”

Long and his team moved into the otherwise empty hotel — he had a suite on the 16th floor — and managed to unload about 90 percent of the stuff in 45 days: the bed sets, the furniture, the kitchen appliances, the works. Sold as-is with buyer responsible for disposal.

“Then we turned it over to the general contractor, who had the demolition done,” Long recalls.

The 22-story hotel became twenty stories, then fifteen and twelve, shrinking almost unnoticed in the heart of Gotham. Then ten stories, then five – and then, in September, gone. On a recent evening, the only movement at the site came from two rats rushing as commuters late for the 11:49 a.m. flight to Babylon.

Vornado has announced plans for a 56-story office tower that, according to a company brochure, will “provide a quality experience rooted in authentic New York.” The building, the report continued, would “provide a workplace experience that is within the essence of New York to attract employees back to the office.”

There is plenty of time to decipher this language, as tight lending practices and other market realities have forced Vornado to postpone its ambitious plans. For now, the company is exploring ways to generate revenue from the site through “fashion shows or other temporary uses,” a company official said recently.

Although the Hotel Pennsylvania no longer towers above Seventh Avenue, it lives on: in the furnishings that now adorn several hotels; in the collection of a Long Island man named Steven Lepore, who secured a stair railing in the final days of demolition; in Glenn Miller’s number, but also in the phone number itself — although a recording simply tells callers, “We are permanently closed.”

And it lives on in an antique store on West 52nd Street called Olde Good Things, about a mile north of the hotel’s absence. There, in the front window, a massive Maria Theresa-style chandelier that once glittered in the hotel ballroom glitters, its many crystals winking at you in the refracted light.