Midtown's Roosevelt Hotel Closes Doors For Good

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — After nearly a century in business, the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown closed its doors permanently on Friday due to a severe loss of revenue caused by the coronavirus.

Hotel general manager Marc Sternagel announced the closure in an email sent to a local government official Friday morning, which was obtained by Patch.

"Please be advised that due to the current Pandemic, The Roosevelt Hotel New York at 45 East 45th Street [...] will permanently close effective today," Sternagel wrote.

The closure will cause at least 431 employees to lose their jobs after they were initially furloughed in March, according to a notice filed with the state.

Hotel management first announced in October that the Roosevelt would close before the end of the year, "due to the current, unprecedented environment and the continued uncertain impact from COVID-19."

The hotel first opened in 1924, occupying a full block just east of Madison Avenue. A fixture of the Midtown skyline, it has played host to a number of historic moments: it 1948, served as the election headquarters for New York Governor Thomas Dewey, where he prematurely and incorrectly announced on election night that he had defeated incumbent President Harry S. Truman.

Now owned by Pakistan International Airlines, the 1,000-room hotel was named after President Theodore Roosevelt and was once linked to neighboring Grand Central Terminal via an underground passageway.

The hospitality industry has been among the hardest-hit by the pandemic. About 7.5 million workers in the industry lost their jobs in April, CNN reported, and only about half had been hired back by early fall.

The Times Square Hilton and Omni Berkshire Place are among the other big-name hotels in New York City to close their doors for good due to economic fallout from the crisis.

Roosevelt Hotel management did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

This article originally appeared on the Midtown-Hell's Kitchen Patch