It’s the building that can’t make up its mind.
The property that is now the Hotel Mela has changed its identity many times as the market shifted, most recently into an upscale hotel from a humble office tower.
For 25 years, most of the 17-story property at 120 West 44th Street served as Class B office space. The last commercial lease ran out in 2001. After about $20 million of renovations and conversions, the property opened its doors again in January. Now it’s a four-star, 235-room luxury hotel.
Its promoters — mela is Italian for apple, as in Big — bill it as a property that “combines the rich culture and history of New York with the high style and fine art of Italian living.” Rates start at $239 a night.
The rooms contain flat-screen TVs, feather-top mattresses, H2O Spa products and arty prints of geometric shapes.
David Lopez, the hotel’s general manager, says business is off to a robust start. Its first month had about a 30 percent occupancy rate, which doubled in February and is projected to hit 75 percent in March. “Those are great numbers for a new hotel,” he said.
This is the fifth incarnation in the last 100 or so years for the storied property — and one that brings it back to its hospitality roots. In the Jazz Age of the 1920s, the site was home to the glamorous King Edwards Hotel, where flappers, actors and musicians slept off their hangovers after late nights in speakeasies.
“A hotel makes much more sense here,” said David Adelipour, who jointly owns the site with developer Joseph Moinian. “They are expecting 30 million visitors to New York City this year. They need a space to stay.”
The history of 120 West 44th Street is a bellwether of the fortunes of the Times Square area over the last century. But its reemergence as a prime piece of hotel real estate also owes much to the booming hospitality trend that has hotels across the city operating at 85 percent capacity and keeps many of them sold out much of the year.
“Times Square is a very strong market,” John Fox, senior vice president of PKF Consulting, said. “And, of course, fitting into the Manhattan market as a whole, we’re coming off a record year. We’ve come somewhat full circle. A couple years ago, a number of hotels were going residential.”
Fox pointed to the planned conversion of the Empire Hotel near Lincoln Center, whose owners recently announced that they have scrapped plans to take it condo. Fox said he has fielded a growing number of inquiries from developers considering converting residential buildings into hotels. But Hotel Mela is the first instance he has heard of an office building making the jump.
Back in the hotel’s heyday, legendary cornet player and jazz composer Bix Beiderbecke — who recorded with Tommy Dorsey — lived in Room 605, where he had a piano in his room.
The hotel began to decline in the postwar era. In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of guests checked in and never left. Under New York’s single room occupancy, or SRO laws, they were granted permanent resident status after four months. By the time the current owners acquired the site, it was in full decline, as was Times Square. “This building was a total mess, actually,” Adelipour recalls.
In 1983 and 1984, Adelipour set to work converting some of the suites into office space, spending about $6 million to renovate. His overhaul was hampered, however, by the elderly tenants who stayed in the building. Most of the new commercial space — there was about 45,000 square feet in total — was on the first seven floors. Floors seven through 17, he left vacant — save for the remaining tenants.
In 1996 and 1997, the building tried on yet another hat: that of college dormitory. The City of University of New York (CUNY) rented out a few floors during a two-year housing crunch. But in the 1990s, the situation around Times Square finally started to pick up. Adelipour allowed the last commercial lease to expire in 2001 and he started construction in 2005, building around the handful of geriatric SRO residents who still live there.
“We saw an opportunity in the area, where there are humongous changes,” he said.