Hotel St. Moritz, 1932.

The Hotel St. Moritz (seen at center) was designed by Emery Roth and constructed in 1930. The 36-story hotel is highly ornamented at the base and the upper floors, while the middle of the building is largely plain. W. Parker Chase described the hotel in his book, "New York, The Wonder City, 1932", "a picturesque cliff, amidst towering trees to the north, and other soaring skyscrapers to the south."

Named for a Swiss resort town, the hotel offered long-term and short-term residence. It quickly became a popular hotel among professional athletes and theatrical figures.

In the 1930s the hotel add the Café de la Paix, a sidewalk cafe that claimed to the be city's first. In 1950 the hotel underwent a complete redesign and renovation, updating the interiors to a mid-century style. The hotel's Rumpelmayer’s Café offered guests and visitors pricey coffee and ice cream.

The hotel was sold a number of times in the last decades of the 20th century with its owners including Harry Helmsey and Donald Trump. Trump had plans to encase the facade in glass, gut the interiors, and convert it to condos. That plan was thwarted by a new buyer in 1999. Changing hands a few times once again, the building was finally purchased and converted into a Ritz-Carlton hotel-condominium. During this conversion the deteriorated ornamentation at the topmost floors were stripped and replaced with copies of the originals. Though the windows replacement was non-historic, the conversion was generally historically sympathetic (for a non-landmark building).