The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was designed by Schultze & Weaver, an architectural firm that specialized in luxury hotels. The building combined a transient hotel and a related but separate residential tower into a 625-foot-high skyscraper, one of the city’s tallest at the time, located in the major new skyscraper office building district developing around Park Avenue near Grand Central Terminal. The architect of the hotel and towers, Lloyd Morgan of the firm of Schultze & Weaver, designed the complex in a sedate but handsome version of the modernistic style now generally referred to as Art Deco, adapting the skyscraper form and an up-to-date look to a conservative traditional establishment.
The first floor includes the Park Avenue Lobby, an entrance hall with 13 murals and a floor mosaic by the French artist Louis Rigal, as well as the wood-paneled Main Lobby, which features black marble columns and an elaborate plaster ceiling.
Located at the center of the first floor is a freestanding clock, bearing portraits of American presidents and Queen Victoria. At the east end of the first floor, near Lexington Avenue, elevators with metal doors and staircases with decorative metalwork resembling “frozen fountains” ascend to the third floor, the ballroom. A long mirrored hallway, the Ballroom Entrance Hall, connects four ballrooms. This glittering space features a vaulted ceiling that incorporates 16 paintings by the American artist Edward Emerson Simmons
