Hotel Marseilles

History and architecture

Prominently situated at the corner of West 103rd Street and Broadway, the Hotel Marseilles is a distinctive Beaux-Arts style apartment hotel constructed in 1902-05, at a time when this section of Broadway on the Upper West Side experienced rapid development aided by the opening of the Broadway (IRT) subway line, which included a stop at Broadway and West 103rd Street. A distinguished example of the wave of large-scale hotel construction that followed the passage of the Tenement House Law of 1901, the Hotel Marseilles was one of several grand hotels and apartment hotels, such as the Astor Hotel and the Ansonia, built along Broadway north of Times Square during the first decade of the twentieth century.

The Hotel Marseilles, clad in brick with limestone, wrought-iron, and terra-cotta trim and crowned with a sloping mansard roof, illustrates the rise of the "modern French" style in commercial and hotel architecture. The appearance of this style in the United States was the result of a sharp increase in the number of American architects attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the concomitant ascent of France as the dominant influence in American architecture in the late nineteenth century.

Erected for the Netherlands Construction Company and leased after completion to the Marseille [sic] Hotel Company, this apartment hotel was designed by noted architect Harry Allan Jacobs, a specialist in hotels and residential buildings. Largely intact, the Hotel Marseilles serves as a significant reminder of the development of Broadway and the Upper West Side in the first decade of the twentieth century.