When hotel historians – hey, they’re out there somewhere — look back on 2012, they’ll say what we already know: it was, for the most part, a very good year.

Bookish: the NoMad library.

New York City boasts 91,500 hotel rooms – up from 90,000 in 2011. Put another way, 29 million hotel room nights were sold in New York City in 2012.

Manhattan’s newest hotels were among its cleverest (cheers to the NoMad, Conrad New York, Pod 39 and TRYP New York Times Square South). And hotels you’d actually want to visit are popping up in the outer boroughs – even Staten Island – with Brooklyn (and the hipster Wythe) leading the charge.

No one will say 2012 was always easy. Killer hurricanes that flood lobbies, kill the lights and uproot guests when nearby building cranes become unhinged don’t blow in every year (we hope).  But as we slip into 2013, for most hotels – and current guests — Sandy is mere memory.

Here is our second annual list of what struck us as the best of the new. (more…)

Hotel shops sell a lot more than Band-Aids, bathrobes and bottled water.  Many stock amusing, even unusual items you’d be happy to give – or receive.

And here’s the best part. Many offer online as well as in-hotel shopping. So browse what caught our eye. There’s still time! (more…)

Louis Rigal murals — and a silver-leaf ceiling.

Less is more is rarely the first thought that leaps to mind when you enter the Park Avenue lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. This massive expanse is one of the most superb examples of Art Deco design in town.

The deco is decorative – allegorical murals by French artist Louis Rigal, gilded ceiling reliefs of frolicking naiads and stags, a floor mosaic of the Wheel of Life made from 150,000 tiny tiles.

Still, there’s notably less to see than there was just a few months ago. While never a candidate for Hoarders, the lobby in its newly renovated incarnation is an emphatic if unexpected salute to Mies van der Rohe’s maxim.

To leap forward the hotel stepped backward, restoring the lobby to the original footprint on view when it opened in 1931.  (more…)

Carlton’s star turn.

Why is Smash, the hit NBC series about the creation of a Broadway musical, our favorite television show this season? We can’t recall a TV show or movie with scenes shot at more New York City hotels.

Over the course of its short season, the actors were shown sipping drinks at the Bryant Park Hotel‘s Cellar Bar, clicking cocktails at the Royalton, downing drinks at W Times Square and ambling past the pink neon marquee of Times Square’s infamous Hotel Carter (you’ll notice they didn’t go inside that one). (more…)

Greening the roof.

In observation of Earth Day (and Month), we pause for a quick pulse check on how New York City hotels are doing on the green front.

This month the city’s largest hotel, the 1,981-room New York Hilton, took a big stride towards energy efficiency.  As befits a big hotel, the gesture is grand.  On view is the hotel’s new green roof occupying 16,000 square feet atop a fifth floor setback. The garden, consisting of a vast array of sedum harvested at an upstate farm, isn’t open to guests. But it offers a glimpse of nature for hotel guests on the 53^rd Street side of the building who happen to gaze down from their windows.

More important, the plants are on board to do what roots and foliage do naturally – absorb airborne pollutants, deflect solar radiation and reduce the thermal load.  The predicted result: less carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and less energy required to keep the building cool. (more…)

We love it when a New York hotel makes a cameo appearance in a novel we like.  So imagine our glee upon opening Rules of Civility, Amor Towles’ exquisitely layered portrait of strivers and high society in late 1930s Manhattan, and following the characters into not one but three hotels, all beauties.

The Depression-era novel is set more in the realm of an Americanized Nancy Mitford or Evelyn Waugh than John Steinbeck, with a silky soundtrack along the lines of Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday. So small surprise the characters meet for drinks at the King Cole Bar at the St Regis and catch a taxi in front of The Carlyle.

But those are walk-ons compared to The Plaza, where Anne Grandyn, a pivotal character, keeps a suite overlooking Central Park. (more…)

Haven’t ordered a turkey yet? Loathe the thought of doing dishes on a holiday? There’s still time to book Thanksgiving dinner – and a room for the night — at a hotel restaurant if you a) act fast and b) aren’t too picky about dining early or late (most prime-time spots are taken).

Like rooms, restaurants at New York hotels come in all styles so you can choreograph Thanksgiving as you wish – splashy or quiet, midtown or downtown, turkey or vegetarian. You can even watch your weight (sort of). Here are five tempting options. (more…)

The Suite Spa Cart.

The new Hyatt 48Lex is a small, upscale hotel that offers guests everything you’d expect, from a restaurant and room service to a well-equipped fitness center – everything, that is, except a spa. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get a hot stone massage or an herbal facial without leaving the premises.

48Lex is the latest in a small contingent of hotels, including the Andaz Wall Street and the Grand Hyatt, offering the Cart – a spa on wheels outfitted with the basics a therapist needs to administer spa treatments in a hotel room.

The Cart looks like a rolling room service table, but instead of Eggs Benedict under a silver dome look for a facial steamer, magnifying lamp and towel warmer, a warming shelf for heating stones or wraps, (more…)

The Waldorf's Hall of Mirrors

It isn’t easy to steal a scene from Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. But the Waldorf=Astoria in all its Art Deco glory does precisely that during the early scenes of The Adjustment Bureau, the new sci-fi-tinged thriller that opened this weekend. After all, there’s not a lot, living or inanimate, that can compete with the Waldorf’s vaunted Hall of Mirrors, patterned after the original in Versailles,  in terms of jaw-drop wonder.

It gives away none of the twisty-turny plot to tell you the early scenes are set at the hotel – its elevator bank, carpeted staircases on the Lexington Avenue side, ballroom and, of course, the Hall of Mirrors. (more…)

It’s the Top Ten list hotels dread. When Trip Advisor released its 2011 roster of the nation’s ten dirtiest

The Hotel Carter.

hotels complete with reader-supplied pictures  — Cockroaches! Black stuff in the showers! Holes on the bathroom floor! – one New York hotel scored a place of dishonor near the top.

It’s a repeater. Time Square’s Carter Hotel, a fixture on Trip Advisor’s anti-hit list since the list began, is Number Four for the second year straight. That’s an improvement; prior to 2010, the hotel took the top spot with amazing consistency.

We’ve heard horror stories about the Carter for years. A stylish friend from California, booked by a clueless travel agent after she requested a “nice, not too expensive Theater District hotel,” spent a night a couple of years ago. (more…)