The four-story hotel that once stood at 131 West 23rd Street in Chelsea is gone. Crews have fully leveled the lot, leaving behind only scattered brick and concrete rubble, and the adjacent lots facing West 24th Street have also been cleared, marking the most visible progress yet on a mixed-use project that has been in the works for more than a decade.
Demolition is complete at the site, according to New York YIMBY, which reports the work wrapped up after beginning earlier in 2026. The planned project is designed by Stonehill Taylor Architects and developed by JHG Holdings, and it's expected to bring apartments, hotel rooms, and amenities to the mid-block parcel between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.
JHG Holdings bought the former hotel building for $11.3 million in 2015, then followed up with a much bigger purchase a year later: the Parish of St. Vincent de Paul at 123 West 23rd Street and two four-story tenement buildings at 116-120 West 24th Street, acquired together for $50.4 million in 2016, per the outlet's reporting. Those acquisitions gave the developer control of a combined 17,968-square-foot, multi-parcel property spanning the block.
A Long, Shifting Road to This Point
The project's roots go back to 2014, when permits were first filed for a 35-story, 445-foot-tall structure on the site, New York YIMBY notes. A 2016 update called for a different footprint entirely — 246 hotel rooms and 29 residential units — but the outlet's latest reporting says it's unclear whether any of those figures still describe what JHG Holdings intends to build.
The plans didn't stop shifting there. A 2018 account from CityRealty described yet another configuration: a 13-story, 170-foot residential tower fronting West 23rd Street paired with a 39-story, 466-foot hotel fronting West 24th Street. That two-tower proposal's zoning documents have since been disapproved.
Money kept flowing into the assembly in the meantime. By January 2017, the site had already cost a combined $79.4 million once acquisitions and development-rights transactions were factored in, according to a Commercial Observer report at the time.
The Old Parish Isn't Going Anywhere
One piece of the block's history is set to survive the overhaul. The Parish of St. Vincent de Paul, currently vacant and boarded up, is planned for incorporation into the new structure rather than demolition, the outlet's report states. Exactly how the finished project will look is still unclear in some respects, since no construction timeline for 131 West 23rd Street has been announced.
For now, the block sits in limbo — cleared ground where a hotel and tenement buildings once stood, a boarded-up church waiting on its next chapter, and a development history that has already cycled through at least three different building configurations since 2014 without landing on a final one.
