What The High Line Hotel is known for
A red-brick 1895 seminary dormitory in Chelsea, reopened as a hotel in 2013. The lobby café pours Intelligentsia beneath the original Gothic ceilings.
The High Line Hotel occupies a building that has nothing to do with hospitality by trade: it was built in 1895 as a dormitory for the General Theological Seminary, an Episcopal school still operating next door. Architect Charles C. Haight designed the Collegiate Gothic campus after Oxford and Cambridge, and the red-brick dormitory is the surviving centerpiece. The land itself has an odd literary footnote — it belonged to Clement Clarke Moore, credited with writing 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, before he donated it to the Episcopal Church in 1817.
MCR Hotels and the Brodsky Organization converted the dormitory into a hotel that opened in May 2013, keeping the Gothic brickwork and arched windows intact. The lobby café and garden serve pour-over and espresso from Intelligentsia Coffee, one of the standard-bearers of American third-wave roasting. The hotel picked up a World's Best Award in 2019 and a Condé Nast Traveler Readers' Choice Award in 2023 — recognition for a building whose original purpose was training clergy, not hosting guests.
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — Intelligentsia coffee inside an 1895 Gothic seminary dormitory turned hotel.
USA
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