At the time it was built, the Marriott Marquis contained the world's tallest hotel atrium at 400 feet.

The convention-hotel also boasted Manhattan's largest grand ballroom and its first revolving restaurant, a three-story, 1,500-seat theater, a second ballroom, and 80,000 square feet of meeting, banquet and exhibition spaces.

The slip-formed concrete core, rooted to the building base, received an award from the NYC Concrete Industry Board.

Structural steel was kept within walls and floors to provide unobstructed windows and natural light to the atrium. The result was an efficient structure of less than two pounds of steel per square foot.

Announced already in 1972, this hotel project was to restore some of the all-public nature of the old Times Square. Portman, acting as a co-developer in this project, collected no less than 90 percent of the financial backing.

Portman's first plan was in the form of two parallel slabs, connected only by five-storey bridges. By the time of the final plan he had incorporated his hotel architecture trademark into the design: an interior atrium, around which the rooms were grouped.

This hotel has 1,946 rooms and suites, four restaurants, three lounges, a coffee shop, and a 1,500 seat legitimate theater.

The atrium's elevator tree was ringed by twelve Tivoli-lit glass-enclosed cabs, which were replaced by fiber optic lighted cabs.

New York City features many highrise restaurants and bars, yet The View atop the hotel is the most famous one, featuring affordable prices and excellent views of the city and the metro area.

The View is the city's highest restaurant since 2001, when Windows of the World atop 1 World Trade Center was brought down by a terrorist attack.

In the 2002 motion picture Spiderman, a computer-generated building was pasted on the site of this hotel.

Burgess Steel was responsible for the installation of steel framing to correct a lack of plumbness from the original construction.

As of February 2007 the hotel is in the final stages of $150 million renovation, with new rooms, escalators and a new high-speed elevator system (Schindler’s Miconic 10® Elevator System).