Convention at the Halloran House during the 1980 United States presidential election, and Mario Cuomo announced his campaign for the 1982 New York gubernatorial election at the hotel. Controversial American-Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated in the hotel's second-floor conference room on November 5, 1990. El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born American citizen, was subsequently charged with and acquitted of Kahane's murder, although Nosair admitted to killing Kahane in 1998. News sources retrospectively cited Nosair's actions as one of the earliest examples of Islamic terrorism in the United States. Impact Critical reception Architectural commentary Christopher Gray wrote that the completed hotel "attracted near-rave reviews from serious critics, who praised its intelligent treatment of the 1916 setback requirements of the zoning law." When the hotel was being constructed, Fiske Kimball wrote for The New York Times, "We may admire the masterly way in which [Harmon] has built up his receding masses into the vast central tower." Hugh Ferriss, comparing the Shelton to a mountain, observed that Harmon "accepted the [1916 Zoning Resolution] not as a limitation, but as a basis" in designing the Shelton. According to Ferriss, the building's design "evokes that undefinable sense of satisfaction which man ever finds on the slope of the pyramid or the mountainside". George Harold Edgall said the design of the Shelton's facade was like "some titanic result of the force of nature rather than a building by the hand of man". Leon Solon wrote in 1926: "We doubt that any design has exerted so prompt and beneficial an influence, both as regards silhouette in structural mass and textural quality." Critics also praised the ideals represented in the hotel building. A correspondent for the Manchester Guardian stated that "this audacious and impressive structure is to be a bachelor hotel for more than a thousand men [...] One feels here implicit a new theory of form", although the correspondent also believed that "the Shelton is uninteresting in ". Bragdon praised the hotel for its "success of , the power to imagine and dramatize a building to the city-dweller the most successful escape from the dirt, ugliness, noise, promiscuity of the city." However, Bragdon felt that the interior "fails somehow to convey the sense of fresh and powerful ideation inspired by the exterior." The New Yorker's architectural critic George S. Chappell said of the hotel: "Its details are simple, its lines graceful, its ornament interesting. It is a