trying to map every "holy shit" room in NYC like = you've been bookmark = you're going if i missed your secret spot, tell me and @exaltedfoks
Griffin Atrium @ Gilder Center @AMNH 415 Columbus Ave, New York, NY Built with shotcrete, a spray-on concrete technique born from an AMNH taxidermist's invention that ended up rewriting architecture. ig: lagracieuse
New York Yacht Club 37 W 44th St #54, New York, NY The 1901 clubhouse was built with a facade shaped like a ship's stern, and the Model Room holds hundreds of exact miniature yachts.
Lobby @ Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice 320 E 43rd St, New York, NY The lobby opens into a 12-story indoor garden from 1967 - one of the world's first climate-controlled atriums, restored with 40 species of trees and plants.
Bemelman’s Bar 35 E 76th St, New York, NY Ludwig Bemelmans (of Madeline fame) painted the entire mural cycle in exchange for a year and a half of free rent back in '47
King Cole Bar @ St Regis Two E 55th St, New York, NY Maxfield Parrish painted the giant mural in 1906, and the rumor is he hid a dirty joke in the king's smirk that the hotel still refuses to explain. 📷 @fibonacci1123
The Earth Room 141 Wooster St, New York, NY A second-floor SoHo loft filled with 140 tons of soil that’s been raked and cared for in the same spot since 1977.
Guggenheim Museum 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY Frank Lloyd Wright made the spiral so stubbornly specific that artists still complain the walls are too perfect to hang anything on.
The Bar Room at The Beekman 123 Nassau St, New York, NY When the building was restored, workers found a sealed shaft stuffed with 19th-century bottles and love notes. 📷 Josh Katz
AIRE Ancient Baths 305 E 61st St, New York, NY Housed in an 1883 textile factory, the brick vaults are original, so you're basically soaking where the steam machines used to roar.
Kings Theatre 1027 Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn, NY A 1929 movie palace so ornate it sat abandoned for decades, then got restored using its original Paris opera blueprints.
The Django @TheRoxyHotelNYC 2 6th Avenue, New York, NY The curvy layout is rumored to bend around old Prohibition smuggling routes underground
The Temple of Dendur @metmuseum 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY Egypt shipped the whole temple to NYC as a thank-you for saving Abu Simbel, and the Met rebuilt it to match the exact Nile sunset. ig: metmuseum
McSorley's Old Ale House 15 E 7th St, New York, NY The dust on the chandeliers is older than most bars in Manhattan. they haven't touched it since the 1800s.
The Russian Tea Room 150 W 57th St, New York, NY Founded by ex-Bolshoi dancers, the place is so gilded it once hid a full aquarium behind the bar just because it could.
The Morgan Library & Museum 225 Madison Ave, New York, NY JP Morgan built it as a private vault for his rare books, and the study's walls are literally lined with secret compartments full of manuscripts.
Hall des Lumières 49 Chambers St, New York, NY Once a 1912 Beaux-Arts bank, the vaults now power floor-to-ceiling light shows where tellers used to count cash.
St. Jean Baptiste Church 184 E 76th St, New York, NY A French-style basilica dropped on Lexington Ave, built with Italian marble and a dome that overpowers most of the Upper East Side. Try to find the hidden vault.
The Champagne & Caviar Bar at RH Guesthouse New York 55 Gansevoort St, New York, NY Every slab of Calacatta gold is book-matched by hand, so the whole bar reads like one uninterrupted piece of stone.
The Hammam Spa House @ Aman 730 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Built inside the 1921 Crown Building, the hammam uses hand-cut marble and a domed steam room modeled on traditional Turkish bathhouses.
The Rose Main Reading Room @ NYPL 476 5th Ave, New York, NY Those sky murals aren't (just) decorative, they are sitting on steel trusses that let the room stretch 80 feet wide without a single pillar.
The Great Room @ The Harvard Club 35 W 44th St, New York, NY Those carved beams and portraits aren't props, the room was built in 1905 as a literal replica of an English college hall.
City Hall Station @NYTransitMuseum Park Row & City Hall Park, New York, NY Its glass skylights and Guastavino arches were so ornate the city shut the station down in 1945 because trains had outgrown the curve. 📷 ig: nyclovesnyc
Library @ The University Club 1 W 54th St, New York, NY The ceiling murals were painted in 1899 by Harry Siddons Mowbray, the same artist who decorated the Vanderbilt Mansion and the Morgan Library. 📷 Kelly Kollar
The Campbell 15 Vanderbilt Ave, New York, NY Once a tycoon's private office in Grand Central, the place still has its original 1920s hand-painted ceiling and stone fireplace the size of a car. 📷 @KarstenMoran
Clemente Bar 11 Madison Ave, New York, NY Francesco Clemente painted two new 17-foot murals specifically for this room - his first permanent public works in New York.
COQODAQ 12 E 22nd St, New York, NY The room's 20,000 shimmering brass discs were hand-installed to mimic a champagne bubble column rising from floor to ceiling.
Keens Steakhouse 72 W 36th St, New York, NY The ceiling is covered with more than 50,000 historic clay pipes, once checked like coats by Gilded Age regulars including Teddy Roosevelt and Babe Ruth. 📷 ig: kyungjinh
Cigar Lounge @ Wall Street Bath // Spa 88 88 Fulton St, New York, NY One of the few spots in Manhattan where you can smoke indoors without it being a private club. 📷 @ExaltedFoks
Nubeluz @RitzCarlton 25 W 28th St Top Floor, New York, NY Perched on the 50th floor of the Ritz-Carlton NoMad, the bar's glowing onyx counters were designed to mirror the city grid as you look out over Manhattan.
The Gold Room 455 Madison Ave, New York, NY Once the mansion's ballroom, its walls are covered in original 1880s gold leaf and carved paneling funded by railroad tycoon Henry Villard.
Ukrainian East Village Restaurant 140 2nd Ave, New York, NY The wood-paneled dining room hasn't changed in decades - a time capsule of East Village Ukrainian culture where the borscht and the vibe both feel immortal.
Atrium @ Alwyn Court 180 W 58th St, New York, NY The central atrium was once an air shaft; in 1981 they capped it with a skylight and added Richard Haas’s trompe-l’oeil mural to mimic the building's famous facade.
The Vault @ Weylin 175 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY You step out of the 1875 cast-iron vault and straight into the old banking hall, a full Gilded Age dome that makes the transition feel unreal.
Stairwell @ Forest Hills Stadium 1 Tennis Pl, Forest Hills, NY The stairwells were enclosed with bass traps in order to lessen the amount of sound that leaves the stadium due to neighborhood complaints. 📷 Joe Shlabotnik
Lobby @ Surrogate's Courthouse 31 Chambers St, New York, NY A three-story hall inspired by the Paris Opera, lined in Sienna marble with a massive 40×60 skylight flooding the double staircase.
The Main Concourse @ Grand Central Terminal 89 E 42nd St, New York, NY The Tiffany-glass clock and celestial ceiling sit above what was once the world's largest indoor room.
The Living Room @ W Union Square 201 Park Ave S, New York, NY Set inside the 1911 Guardian Life Beaux-Arts building, the bar keeps its original marble columns and coffered ceilings from the old insurance headquarters.
The Bar @ The Grill 99 E 52nd St, New York, NY The bar sits inside the old Four Seasons space, with Philip Johnson's original 1959 brass beading and Mies van der Rohe's walnut panels still intact.
Lobby @ Woolworth Building 233 Broadway, New York, NY The lobby is a 1913 Gothic fantasy lined with glass mosaics and sculpted gargoyles, including one of architect Cass Gilbert holding the building like a toy.
Red Room Bar 1 Wall St, New York, NY The Red Room is wrapped in 1928 mosaics by Hildreth Meière, the Art Deco master behind the iconic roundels on Radio City Music Hall. 📷 ig: bklynjake
The Unicorn Room @ The Cloisters 99 Margaret Corbin Dr, New York, NY The room was built around the seven medieval Unicorn Tapestries, 500 years old and so precious the Met reconstructed a full period hall just to house them.
Meeting Room @ MoMA PS1 22 Jackson Ave, Queens, NY James Turrell cut a perfect square opening in the ceiling so the sky becomes the artwork.
Prada Epicenter New York 575 Broadway, New York, NY Rem Koolhaas gutted the old Guggenheim SoHo space and built the giant maple wave - a single swooping wood landscape that turned the store into a runway, stage, and staircase all at once.
The Rotunda @ Pierre 2 E 61st St, New York, NY The 1967 mural by Edward Melcarth hides real New York elites in Renaissance drag - including a disguised Jackie Kennedy the hotel had to paint over after she complained.
Toilet @ Summit One Vanderbilt 45 E 42nd St, New York, NY One of the only spots in the city where you can sit on a toilet 1,000 feet up and stare straight out at the Manhattan skyline.
SABYASACHI 160 Christopher St, New York, NY Sabyasachi Mukherjee packed the townhouse with antiques from his own archives, so half the décor is literally pulled from his personal collection.
i’ll keep adding as i find more. if i missed yours, tell me. bookmark it and come back when you need a place that hits.