over the hotel in 1990 and operated it until 2020, when the hotel permanently closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Site The New York Marriott East Side, originally the Shelton Hotel, is at 525 Lexington Avenue, on the southeast corner with 49th Street, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It sits on the western portion of a city block bounded by Lexington Avenue to the west, 49th Street to the north, Third Avenue to the east, and 48th Street to the south. The hotel occupies an irregular land lot with an area of ; the eastern portion of the lot extends southward to 48th Street. The site has a frontage of on Lexington Avenue, on 49th Street, and wide on 48th Street. The New York Marriott East Side wraps around another building at the northeast corner of 48th Street and Lexington Avenue (which was completed around 2009), and it abuts a public plaza to the southeast. When the Shelton was constructed, the corner lot contained a three-story brick building, which was destroyed in 1939. The hotel is across from 277 Park Avenue to the southwest, the InterContinental New York Barclay Hotel and 299 Park Avenue to the west, the Waldorf Astoria New York to the northwest, and the Lexington Hotel NYC to the south. The Shelton was part of "Hotel Row", a collection of hotels developed along Lexington Avenue in the early 20th century. The surrounding section of Lexington Avenue from 42nd to 52nd Street did not experience significant development until the late 19th century, when row houses and tenements, made of brick and brownstone, were developed in the area. Architecture The New York Marriott East Side was designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon, who went on to design the Empire State Building and 500 Fifth Avenue. The hotel was originally known as the Shelton, an apartment hotel, and was developed by James T. Lee, grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The hotel contains elements of the Lombard Revival style, although Harmon wanted to avoid clear allusion to any specific architectural style, saying that "the masses of such modern buildings have no architectural precedence". Christopher Gray of The New York Times wrote that Harmon "covered the mass with irregular yellowy-tan brick, roughened as if centuries old, and for details, drew from Romanesque, Byzantine, early Christian, Lombard and other styles." The hotel's developer described the building as being