Carlyle Hotel

The Carlyle Hotel, A Rosewood Hotel, known formally as The Carlyle, is a combination luxury and residential hotel located at 35 East 76th Street on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 76th Street, in the Upper East Side area of New York City. The hotel is designed in Art Deco style and was named after Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle.

Owned since 2001 by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, the Carlyle is a cooperative with 191 rental rooms and suites, and 60 privately owned residences.

The Carlyle was built by Moses Ginsberg, maternal grandfather of Rona Jaffe. Designed by architects Sylvan Bien and Harry M. Prince, it opened as a residential hotel, with apartments costing up to $1,000,000 a year. Apartment hotels had become increasingly popular since World War I. As the economy boomed and skyscrapers rose, New York was transforming so quickly that owning a townhouse began to fall out of fashion. The new thirty-five floor hotel "was to be a masterpiece in the modern idiom, in which shops and restaurants on the lower floors would give residents the convenience and comforts of a "community skyscraper". However, by the time the Carlyle was ready to open its doors, the had decisively ended the boom times. The new hotel struggled, went into receivership in 1931 and was sold to the Lyleson Corporation in 1932. The new owners kept the original management, which was able to dramatically improve the property's financial situation through maintaining high occupancy and rates favorable to the hotel's costs. However, the hotel's reputation at this time was "staid rather than ritzy".

The next postwar boom allowed the hotel to take on new high-society prominence. In 1948, New York businessman Robert Whittle Downing purchased the Carlyle and began to transform it from a "respectable" address to a "downright fashionable" one, frequented by elegant Europeans. That year, Harry S. Truman became the first president to visit the Carlyle; each of his successors through Bill Clinton followed.

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