Martinis at The Knickerbocker Hotel

A Martini, a Myth, and a Midtown Hotel

10 Minute read

16 Apr 2026

Liz Provencher

Journalist

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At The Knickerbocker Hotel in New York City, the martini’s origin story blurs fact and legend, shaping a bar culture that has endured for more than a century.

In New York City, there is no shortage of iconic hotels, but The Knickerbocker Hotel carries a distinct legacy. Unveiled in the heart of Times Square 120 years ago, it served as a destination for the city’s most glamorous visitors and has hosted a rotating cast of power brokers, performers, and other tastemakers. It has always been far more than just a place to lay your head.

While dozens of household names stayed at the property, an even larger roster of the country’s most influential figures passed through the iconic address by bellying up to the bar, making it one of the most distinguished hotel bars in history. It is widely credited as the birthplace of the martini. Whether myth or meticulously documented fact, the story has helped cement The Knickerbocker Hotel bar as a cornerstone of American drinking culture.

That is, until Prohibition relegated the city’s drinking habits underground. Those changes shuttered the business, but the bar was later resurrected just in time to meet the modern-day revival of old-school drinks and a renewed appetite for over-the-top hospitality. Over 120 years, The Knickerbocker Hotel bar has been reborn again and again, shaped by major moments in history. As the building celebrates its 120th anniversary, here is a look back at how the hotel bar has evolved through pivotal moments.

The First Pour

When John Jacob Astor IV opened The Knickerbocker Hotel in 1906, it joined a group of legendary spaces that helped catapult the city into a travel destination. Just steps from the newly minted Times Square, the hotel quickly became a gathering place for the city’s elite, including opera singer Enrico Caruso, playwright George Cohan, and author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who referenced it by name in his debut novel This Side of Paradise, noting that the bar was “well crowded.” Dozens of deals were made while leaning against the bartop, from real estate changing hands to Babe Ruth verbally committing to play for the Yankees.

“It was a really happening place,” says Chris Miller, the hotel’s modern-day beverage director. “They called it the 42nd Street Country Club, because it was the place to be. It was a gathering place for the whole gamut of influential people.”

While the hotel’s restaurant was a grand dining room with flowing Champagne and banquet dinners of French fare served to oil tycoons and heiresses, the bar was a dark, smoke-filled room. Above the stick, a grand painting by Maxfield Parrish, commissioned by Astor himself, anchored the space and lent it a sense of opulence. The work is now the centerpiece of the nearby King Cole Bar.

Despite its notoriety, the bar managed to feel under the radar, and its secluded atmosphere was part of the draw for these Gilded Age socialites. “There was an entrance to the hotel in the subway station just below us,” Miller says. “So people could easily go in and out without being seen.”

An Iconic Cocktail Is (Allegedly) Born

Cocktail origin stories are often murky at best, especially when the creation dates back more than a century. Legend has it that the dry martini may have been invented in The Knickerbocker Hotel bar.

Martinis made with sweet and dry vermouth, known as perfect martinis, were already in vogue, but some say bartender Martini di Arma di Taggia was the first to serve a different version made with gin, dry vermouth, and a dash of orange bitters. In some tellings, the drink was served to John D. Rockefeller himself. This tale was chronicled in The World of Drinks and Drinking, a 1972 book by British writer John Doxat.

However, the drink’s roots “still lie in darkness,” as cocktail historian David Wondrich wrote in Stirring Up Tradition: The Knickerbocker’s Martini Legacy. Other theories connect the cocktail to a San Francisco bar in 1863 or to Harry Johnson’s Bartenders’ Manual, which featured a martini recipe in 1888, 18 years before The Knickerbocker opened. “There have been plenty of nominees for its creation, but when subjected to careful investigation, their claims melt away like the ice chips in a dive-bar highball,” Wondrich says.

The drink’s genesis may remain a mystery, but even if the martini was simply a go-to for the hotel’s imbibers, it remains a fable shared widely at the hotel. “There’s something that just feels right about drinking a martini here,” Miller says. “So we leaned in.”

Prohibition Brings Drinking Underground

When alcohol was outlawed, the city’s polished drinking dens were upended, and The Knickerbocker Hotel bar was no exception. A room once packed with revelers went barren, and even with the restaurant still in operation and hotel rooms occupied, The Knickerbocker Hotel could not turn a profit.

Vincent Astor, who took over after the hotel’s original owner died on the Titanic, remodeled the property into an office building not long after Prohibition began on January 17, 1920. While much of the building’s history was stripped away, the grill room remained intact. The space continued operating in its new iteration but did not achieve the same notoriety as the hotel bar, even being called “gray and dull” in a New-York Tribune review.

The Modern-Day Martini Resurgence

After the hotel was converted into an office building in 1920, it spent eight decades shape-shifting. From the headquarters of Newsweek magazine to a textile showroom, the building lived many lives. Then, in 2015, more than a century after it first opened, the Beaux-Arts–style building returned to its original purpose as a hotel after a $240 million redevelopment.

As an ode to the hotel’s past, the fourth-floor bar space was reimagined as a Martini Lounge. A roving martini cart allows bartenders to prepare a classic martini with Plymouth Gin, Noilly Prat dry vermouth, a dash or two of orange bitters, and a choice of olive or lemon twist to garnish, exactly as the drink was first made under this roof.

The bar expanded its martini menu to match modern tastes, adding a Vesper and another original martini served with a caviar-topped croquette. For its 120th anniversary, the bar is hosting a Martini Minute from 5:00 to 5:15 pm every Tuesday through Saturday, where visitors can try a complimentary mini version of the classic. For die-hard fans, the hotel has converted one of its suites into a martini-themed space with in-room drink service and other historic touches.

Whether the martini was truly born here or not may never be settled. But at The Knickerbocker Hotel, the story endures, poured into every chilled glass and retold with each careful stir. In a city that has reinvented itself time and again, the ritual of the martini remains a constant, a link between past and present, and a reminder that some of the most enduring traditions are the ones we choose to believe in.