A couple weeks ago while the Hotel News Now team was in New York for the NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference, we scouted locations around the New York Marriott Marquis to shoot one of the quick daily recap videos we do at conferences.
In the process, some of the team went up to the top floor and discovered that hotel gem from days gone by — the revolving restaurant.
They had discovered The View, one of the (I thought) last bastions of hotel revolving restaurants here in the U.S., but more on that history later. I had honestly forgotten it was up there, accustomed as I am these days to spend all my Marriott Marquis time on the far more stable sixth floor.
One of my team had never seen a revolving restaurant before, so it was fun to describe it. “It rotates, with windows all around, but it’s not like it rotates fast,” I said. And I think I added something to the tune of, “You’ll see this round-shaped thing on the top of big atrium Marriotts and Hyatts in cities like Atlanta and Memphis and that’s how you’ll know it had a revolving restaurant.”
I felt about 100 years old describing this, and it made me wonder just how many of these still remain, or if they’d gone the same retro way as the Holidome and just been shut off or repurposed into storage space.
My brothers and I would always beg to go to the revolving restaurants we saw on our family vacations in the 1980s, in exotic cities like Milwaukee and Louisville. You could spot them from the street (or from our Holiday Inn Holidome) thanks to that dead-giveaway architectural design.
As a college freshman, I went to New York City for the first time for a student conference at the Marriott Marquis, where my friend and I promptly blew off the entire conference in favor of riding the subway all day and indulging in a $19.99 midnight dessert buffet at The View, while slowly rotating around Manhattan.
But that was the late '90s. I was sure these restaurants were relics now. Turns out there are plenty of them alive and well, which I find just delightful.
Like fine restaurants, fancy hotels and cross-country train and air travel, revolving restaurants are one of those things that just seem classy in a 1960s way.
The description of one revolving restaurant in Memphis, from a 1960s newspaper ad, promises “a fascinating restaurant with magnificent appointments in dining rooms that seem to blend with the stars!” You can’t help but picture a time and place when people made a big deal over going out to eat, going to the fancy hotel downtown and hitting that button to take you all the way up to the revolving restaurant.
Think of it this way: Today’s trend of hotel rooftop bars? That’s how exciting these revolving hotel restaurants were from the 1960s through the 1980s. But again, I was curious about what they're like today.
Today rotating restaurants definitely still are global attractions in city landmarks like Sydney Tower, Berlin’s TV Tower and the CN Tower in Toronto. But I was most curious about the ones in secondary-city hotels that I remember, in places like Milwaukee and Louisville.
Turns out of course I only had to go to Wikipedia to find out.
Plenty of them still exist! And I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. And they look fantastic. I can’t wait to pop into one the next time I'm in Indianapolis or Cincinnati or Phoenix, just for that feeling of fun and joy I remember.
Yes, they are still concentrated in the Midwest, and that also gives me some nostalgic comfort. Looking out over Indianapolis is not at all like looking out over Manhattan, but that idea of “hey, our city may not be New York, but it’s still really cool from this perspective!” delights me. It’s like those retro motel postcards from the 1960s that showcased the parking lot and the postage stamp-sized pool of the Any Midwestern City Motor Inn. There is something really special about leaning in to what you authentically are as a hotel or city, even if it’s not midtown Manhattan.
So they do still exist, but let's face it — they're a dying breed. Revolving restaurants, like the atrium hotels they often sit atop, just aren't built anymore. Operationally speaking, they’re probably a nightmare. They’re huge, and who do you call when the rotating platform breaks?
But what a unique, fun feature that gives people a different perspective from their phone screen.
If you run or work in a hotel with a revolving restaurant, please let me know. Email me, or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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