Aspen Lux Resort Seeking to Open Hotel in Rockefeller Center, Reaches Final Approval Stage

The Little Nell, the company behind a five-star luxury ski resort based in Aspen, Colorado, is in its final stages of acquiring a special permit to create a 136-room hotel on the 10 floors in an office building that towers above NBC’s Today Show studio at 10 Rockefeller Plaza.

Currently, the floors are vacant office spaces. In order to be able to convert the commercial space into a residential one, Little Nell Big Apple LLC (the firm behind the proposed hotel) needs to acquire a hotel special permit, an application process that began towards the end of last year. Manhattan Community Board 5 approved the application in July (37 in favor, 0 against, with 1 abstaining), and Mark Levine, the Manhattan Borough President, gave his thumbs up at the beginning of August.

“Tourists have been coming back to the city in droves,” Levine said in his recommendation on the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) application submitted by Little Nell Big Apple.

“In May, State Comptroller [Tony] DiNapoli published data that domestic visitors increased 7 percent from 2022 to 2023, while international visitors increased 23.4 percent during the same time period,” Levine noted. “New York City is the leading domestic destination in the country, and tourists visiting in 2023 spent 1.3 percent more than in 2019, totaling $48 billion. Meanwhile, demand for Manhattan office space has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, causing property owners to become creative about office buildings’ future uses,” he said.

The City Planning Commission gave its approval on October 16, according to the NYC Planning Zoning Application Portal website. Neither the City Council nor Mayor Eric Adams shot the proposal down, which means that the final milestone is sending an approval letter to the “responsible agency.” According to the City Environmental Quality Review of the project (submitted in 2023) construction should take place over a period of 13 months, with the hotel opening in Q3 of 2026.

The Statement of Findings concluded that “steps will be taken on-site to prevent undue vehicular and pedestrian congestion....The proposed hotel use will promote–not impair–the future use and development of the surrounding area. The hotel will be located in the heart of Rockefeller Center – an iconic tourist-oriented area that attracts millions of visitors to New York City every year. As such, the hotel will complement the existing character of the surrounding area and promote its continued use by providing hospitality services to visitors and by contributing to the City’s tourism economy.”

The 17-story commercial building sits directly between the NBC studio and the Nintendo store on the west side of Rockefeller Plaza. According to the Hotel Special Permit Proposal submitted by Little Nell Big Apple, the lobby of the proposed hotel will sit on the seventh floor, which will also include a reception and lounge area, an accessory restaurant, a library/function room, an accessory office space, and storage. Floor eight “will include an accessory spa and fitness center...housekeeping services and a staff eating area, and approximately three hotel rooms,” with floors nine through sixteen being devoted solely to hotel rooms (except for the western half of floor sixteen, which “will include existing open mechanical space”). Two elevators located in the hotel lobby will exclusively serve the hotel floors.

A PR representative for Little Nell said that they are still in the review process, but could not share further details.