Hilton, a Midtown Hotel Built for the Future, Turns 50

Robert Caplin for The New York Times The New York Hilton Midtown, the largest hotel in the city, opened 50 years ago on Wednesday.

When the New York Hilton at Rockefeller Center opened on June 26, 1963, it was promoted as the largest, most modern hotel in the city. But Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic for The New York Times, was underwhelmed.

“The Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush,” she wrote. “If the building has a look that suggests that one might put change in at the top and get something out of the bottom, tis is only because today’s slickly designed commercial structures more and more frequently resemble a product, a machine, or a package.”

It is probably true that the slablike, 46-story building that is now called the New York Hilton Midtown and its 1,980 rooms will never draw comparisons to the Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza or the Pierre. Nonetheless, its opening 50 years ago marked a major turning point for the hospitality industry and the hotelier Conrad Hilton.

“Hilton is building for the future,” Charles Ritz, the director of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, said in 1965 when he was a guest at the Hilton.

“This, without a doubt, was a signature statement for Hilton,” said Mark Young, the archivist and historian at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management at the University of Houston. “The Waldorf was his baby, but he always wanted something else in New York that had all the bells and whistles of its day.”

At the ! Hilton, on Avenue of the Americas between 53rd and 54th Streets, the staff is observing the milestone quietly. At a celebratory reception Wednesday night, the cocktail menu will include vintage drinks from the hotel’s “Mad Men” era â€" Bacardi and Tab, anyone?

Conceived during the days of the jet set and geared toward large conventions and trade shows, the Hilton’s automated, air-conditioned efficiency and corporate-tower appearance fit its time perfectly.

The architect was William Tabler, “the Henry Ford of hotels,” said Annabel Jane Wharton, a professor at Duke University and the author of “Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture.” “He really commodified space. The Hilton made the shift, at least in the United States, from the gracious and the luxurious to the utterly functional.”

The Hilton, which carried a $75 million price tag, did not skimp on aesthetics. Its owners spent half a million dollars on public art and installed som 8,000 paintings and prints in the rooms; among the artists represented were Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Krasner, Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell.

Professor Wharton, while not a fan of the building itself, praised the lobby’s original “streamlined furnishings” for their “brash, utter embrace of the contemporary.”

Appearances aside, the Hilton has seen its share of history. Every president since John F. Kennedy has stayed there, as did the Beatles when they played “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964. Seven years later, John Lennon wrote the lyrics to “Imagine” in the Hilton on a piece of its stationery.

The Hilton was also the site of the world’s first hand-held mobile phone call. On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, a pioneering telecommunications engineer at Motorola, hoisted his prototype two-and-a-half-pound DynaTAC outside the Hilton and dialed Joel Engel, the research chief at Bell Labs, to announce, “Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cellphone, a re! al hand-h! eld portable cellphone.” Mr. Cooper then entered the building for a crowded news conference.

But the Hilton isn’t beholden to its past. The hotel no longer has 15 hospitality suites named for writers associated with New York like Damon Runyon, Dorothy Parker and Wolcott Gibbs, complete with photographs and examples of their works. Long gone, too, is the “Lady Hilton” program, in which wives of conventioneers were distracted with what promotional literature described as “fashion shows, cosmetic demonstrations, gourmet cooking presentations, guest lectures, etc.”

And as of August, the hotel will be ending food and beverage service to its rooms as a cost-cutting measure, a decision that has attracted widespread attention and is part of a nascent trend in the industry.

Room service, however, was indispensable in 1971, when a team from The New York Times holed up secretly in nie rooms on the 11th and 13th floors to work on the Pentagon Papers. An assistant foreign editor, Gerald Gold, made the arrangements, having rejected a suggestion that the work be done in a motel in New Rochelle, N.Y.

“We’d go crazy up there,” Mr. Gold was quoted as saying in his obituary in The Times.