The landmarks committee of Community Board 5 last night voted 6 to 1 to recommend that the stately Hotel Pennsylvania be designated an official city landmark.

The committee's vote is not binding on the full board and the board's vote is not binding on the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Nonetheless, the committee's vote is likely to slow down the momentum that had been building in recent weeks to demolish the hotel in the wake of reports that Merrill Lynch wanted to lease the property from Vornado Real Estate Trust for 65 years for $1 billion and erect a $3 billion skyscraper with large trading floors.

The Merrill Lynch plan was rather astounding given recent disclosures that it has lost several billion dollars this year in investments related to sub-prime mortgages and that a move uptown might cost it about one billion dollars more than remaining in Lower Manhattan.

On October 27, 2007, the front page lead article in The New York Times by Landon Thomas Jr. and Jenny Anderson indicated that Merrill Lynch was weighing the ouster of its top officer, E. Stanley O'Neal in the "wake of a third-quarter loss of $2.3 billion and an $8.4 billion charge for failed credit and mortgage-related investments." Mr. O'Neal resigned yesterday.

The hotel was designed by McKim, Mead & White, the same firm that designed the original Pennsylvania Station directly across Seventh Avenue from the hotel.

The hotel occupies the blockfront between 33rd and 32nd Street while the original train station, which was demolished in 1963, occupied the avenue frontage between 33rd and 31st Streets.

When it opened in 1919, the Hotel Pennsylvania was the largest in the city with about 2,200 rooms.

There plans to demolish the Hotel Pennsylvania and relocate Madison Square Garden to the James A. Farley Post Office Building, also designed by McKim, Mead & White, are a central part of a much larger plan by the city to significantly redevelop much of southwest midtown Manhattan, a plan that involves an expansion of the Javits Convention Center, the creation of a major new angled boulevard between 42nd and 34th Streets to be known as Hudson Yards, and the creation of a major new residential and office complex on platforms over the train yards between 30th and 33rd Streets east of 10th Avenue as well as an extension of the Number 7 subway line.

The Hotel Pennsylvania is one of the last surviving examples of very large hotels built to accommodate train travelers. In the Grand Central Terminal neighborhood, the former Commodore and Biltmore Hotels have been transformed from their original elegant designs as part as Warren & Wetmore's grand "Terminal City" complex and rumors abound that the Roosevelt Hotel, the last of that district's major "railroad hotels" may be demolished.

The hotel was erected by the Pennsylvania Railroad and operated by Ellsworth Statler and was acquired by the Hotels Statler Company in 1949 and renamed the New York Statler Hotel. Conrad Hilton acquired the Statler chain in 1954 and renamed the hotel the The Statler Hilton. In the early 1980s, Hilton sold the property and it became the New York Statler again. In 1984, it was acquired by the Penta chain but in 1992, it reverted to the Hotel Pennsylvania.

The hotel's telephone number, Pennsylvania 6-5000 is supposedly the New York City telephone number in longest continuous use and was famous as the name of a song by the Glenn Miller band. Other bands that played in its ballroom were the Dorsey Brothers, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington.

In early October, 2007, Vornado Real Estate Trust began erecting scaffolding around the hotel, which, according to an August 14, 2007 article by Julie Satow in The New York Sun was netting "Vornado $30 million in gross profit annually."