The first thing a literary pilgrim needs to understand about 59 West 44th Street is that the lunch is not over. The Round Table is still set. The dining room on the ground floor of the Algonquin Hotel — between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, halfway down the block, behind a discreet awning that gives away nothing — still bears the name of the most famous standing reservation in American literary history. You can walk in. You can sit down. You can order. The cat in the lobby is real, the lineage is unbroken, and somewhere in the room the ghost of a wisecrack is still landing.

For ten years, between the summer of 1919 and the early 1930s, a rotating cast of New York’s sharpest writers, critics, editors, and playwrights ate lunch here every weekday. They called themselves, with a self-mocking wink, the Vicious Circle. Newspapers called them the Algonquin Round Table. Out of that lunch came The New Yorker, a stack of Pulitzer Prizes, a Best Screenplay Oscar, the founding of the Newspaper Guild, the screenplay-fueled second careers of half the table, and the most quoted set of one-liners in 20th-century American conversation. The address has not moved. The dining room is the same dining room. This is the pilgrim’s altar.

How a Practical Joke Became a Decade-Long Lunch

The Algonquin opened its doors on November 22, 1902, originally planned as a residential hotel — single rooms went for two dollars a night, three-bedroom suites for ten — until the first general manager, Frank Case, realized short-term guests paid better and tilted the business toward transient literary trade. Case eventually bought the hotel outright and ran it until his death in 1946. He is the indispensable figure in the Round Table story. Without Case, no lunch.

According to the hotel’s own history, the first gathering happened in the summer of 1919, when “a group of writers met in the Pergola Room for a party and came to have lunch at the Algonquin every day after that for the next 10 years.” What began as a one-off welcome-back party for the theater critic Alexander Woollcott — recently returned from covering the First World War for Stars and Stripes — calcified within weeks into a daily ritual. Frank Case eventually moved them out of the Pergola Room and into the main dining room, where they were given a large round table at the rear of the room. The press picked up the seating arrangement, gave it a name, and the brand was born. As the hotel itself puts it: “Frank Case moved them out into the main dining and the world was introduced [to] the Vicious Circle.”

The Vicious Circle, Member by Member

The Round Table was never a fixed roster. Membership was elastic, and writers cycled in and out depending on careers, marriages, and Hollywood contracts. But the core of the table — the people who showed up, day after day, for years — produced a body of work whose imprint on American letters is staggering.

Dorothy Parker is the figure most pilgrims come for. The Algonquin’s own profile is exact: “Parker’s career began as a theater critic writing for Vogue and Vanity Fair. After being dismissed from Vanity Fair she went to Life Magazine. The Round Table grew her fame and daily newspapers were publishing her sharp and witty phrases. She became known for her short stories, poems and screenplays.” The Vanity Fair dismissal — for theater reviews considered too cutting — is the moment that makes Parker’s career. Her colleagues Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood resigned in solidarity. All three kept lunching at the Algonquin.

Robert Benchley was, per the hotel’s own biography, “tapped as the first managing editor of Vanity Fair” before leaving in protest with Parker. He moved on to Life, then to the stage after a 1922 revue, then to Hollywood, where in 1935 he won an Academy Award.

Harold Ross is the founder pilgrims tend to underestimate. The hotel’s account is unambiguous: “After winning a handsome amount of money in a poker game against other Round Table members, Harold Ross finances and creates The New Yorker.” The poker game was held at the Algonquin; the magazine launched in 1925. It is hard to overstate what that single hand of cards did to American magazine writing.

Alexander Woollcott was, in the hotel’s words, “the central member of the Round Table. He was the New York Times theater critic and for some time wrote his reviews in a room on the third floor of the hotel.” Woollcott’s eccentricity later became a literary character: he was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the dyspeptic theater monster of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1939 play The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Robert Sherwood stood six foot seven, the tallest man at the table. He started at Vanity Fair alongside Parker and Benchley, walked out with them, and went on to win four Pulitzer Prizes and, per the hotel’s biography, “an Oscar for best screenplay” in 1946.

George S. Kaufman wrote or co-wrote 46 plays, of which 26 were hits, and won two Pulitzer Prizes. His most fertile collaborations were with two other Round Table regulars: Marc Connelly, with whom he wrote a string of Broadway successes, and Edna Ferber, with whom he wrote The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight, and Stage Door. Connelly’s play The Green Pastures won him a Pulitzer Prize. Ferber’s novel So Big won the Pulitzer in 1924; her later novels — Show Boat, Giant, Ice Palace — became some of the most adapted source material of the 20th century.

Franklin Pierce Adams — known on every newspaper masthead simply as F.P.A. — wrote the column “The Conning Tower” for the New York Tribune, the New York World, and the New York Evening Post. He was the table’s amplifier. A line spoken at lunch could appear in F.P.A.’s column the next morning, and from there flow into the wider American conversation. Many of the Parker witticisms still in circulation reached print first through “The Conning Tower.”

Heywood Broun was the table’s conscience. A sportswriter and columnist for the New York Tribune and New York World, he founded the Newspaper Guild — the union that still represents American newsroom workers — and was married to the feminist organizer Ruth Hale, who founded the Lucy Stone League to defend married women’s right to keep their own surnames. The Round Table was funny. Broun made it consequential.

What Was Made at This Table

It is easy to read the Round Table as a clique of clever drinkers. The output argues otherwise. Within a fifteen-year stretch, the regulars at this lunch produced or were directly responsible for: the founding of The New Yorker (1925); two Pulitzer Prizes for Kaufman; Sherwood’s four Pulitzers; Connelly’s Pulitzer for The Green Pastures; Ferber’s Pulitzer for So Big (1924); Benchley’s Academy Award (1935); Sherwood’s Academy Award for best screenplay (1946); Parker’s body of short stories, poetry, and screenplays; and the founding of the Newspaper Guild. Show Boat, Giant, Stage Door, Dinner at Eight, The Royal Family, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and most of the early New Yorker casual-essay style: all traceable to this room.

The Other Algonquin Stories Worth Knowing

The Round Table is the headline, but the hotel’s literary biography runs deeper. Frank Case adopted a friendly resident cat named Billy, who lived at the hotel for fifteen years; two days after Billy’s death, a stray walked in looking for food and was renamed Hamlet. Every cat in the lobby since has carried the name Hamlet (if male) or Matilda (if female). It is an unbroken line of resident cats more than a century old. The hotel’s website confirms the lineage; the current Hamlet or Matilda is usually asleep on the front desk or one of the lobby chairs.

When Prohibition ended, Case reopened the hotel bar; the actor John Barrymore, then a regular, persuaded him to drape blue gels over the lights because, in Barrymore’s view, faces looked better that way. The Blue Bar has carried that name and that lighting ever since. On March 25, 1936, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle convened at the Algonquin and argued for three hours before voting to award their first prize to Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset — an award presented at a dinner at the hotel a week later, and the founding act of one of the most important annual prizes in American theater.

What’s Still Standing — A Pilgrim’s Inventory

This is the heart of the matter. The Algonquin Hotel still operates at 59 West 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, New York, NY 10036. The Round Table dining room is still the Round Table dining room — refurbished, but the same space, named in honor of the Vicious Circle. The Blue Bar still exists, still bathed in the blue light John Barrymore proposed. The lobby, the staircase, and the third floor where Woollcott once filed his reviews are all intact. There is a resident cat. The hotel was added to Marriott’s Autograph Collection but has not been gutted; the bones of the 1902 building, the 1919 dining room, and a century of unbroken literary patronage are all in place. Few literary addresses in New York have survived this completely.

The Pilgrim’s Practical Guide

Address. 59 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, on the south side of the street.

Transit. The closest subway is 42nd Street–Bryant Park on the B, D, F, M lines (with the 7 train at the connected 5th Avenue station), one block south and a few steps east. Times Square–42nd Street (1, 2, 3, 7, N, Q, R, W, S) is two blocks west. Grand Central (4, 5, 6, 7, S) is three blocks east, an easy walk along 44th. From Grand Central, walk west on 44th past the Yale Club and the Harvard Club; the Algonquin is the short awning on your left, just past Sixth Avenue.

How to visit. The dining room and the Blue Bar are open to the public; you do not need to be a hotel guest. Hours shift seasonally — the official source is algonquinhotel.com/the-round-table for the dining room and algonquinhotel.com/the-blue-bar for the bar. Weekday lunch is the most pilgrim-correct visit: that was the meal the Round Table ate. A martini at the Blue Bar after 5 p.m. is the second most authentic option.

What to read before you go. The two indispensable secondary sources are James R. Gaines’s Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table and Marion Meade’s Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?. The primary text is The Portable Dorothy Parker, originally compiled by Parker herself and still in print.

Pair the visit. The pilgrim block radiates outward. The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library — the lions, the Rose Reading Room — is two blocks south at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Bryant Park is directly behind it. Kinokuniya Bookstore, one of Manhattan’s best stocks of art and design titles, is at 1073 Sixth Avenue, opposite the park. The diamond district on 47th Street and the theater district to the west are within five minutes’ walk. A Saturday literary route through Midtown can begin at the Algonquin, cross to the NYPL, end at Kinokuniya, and conclude with a martini at the Blue Bar — a four-block walk that contains an enormous slice of 20th-century American literary infrastructure.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where exactly is the Algonquin Round Table?
The Round Table is the dining room on the ground floor of the Algonquin Hotel at 59 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The hotel and the dining room are both still in operation under their original names.

When did the Round Table meet?
The daily lunches began in the summer of 1919 — initially as a welcome-back party for the theater critic Alexander Woollcott — and continued every weekday for roughly ten years, into the early 1930s.

Who was at the Algonquin Round Table?
The core regulars included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Marc Connelly, Heywood Broun, and Franklin Pierce Adams (F.P.A.). Membership was elastic; many other writers, actors, and editors passed through.

What did the Round Table accomplish?
The group’s regulars were directly responsible for founding The New Yorker (1925), winning multiple Pulitzer Prizes (Sherwood, Kaufman, Connelly, Ferber), founding the Newspaper Guild (Broun), and shaping a generation of American humor, drama, and screenwriting. Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood both later won Academy Awards.

Can I eat lunch at the Round Table today?
Yes. The Round Table is open to the public for dining. Hours and reservations are listed on algonquinhotel.com. The dining room and the Blue Bar both still operate inside the same hotel that hosted the Vicious Circle.

Is there really a hotel cat?
Yes. The Algonquin’s resident-cat lineage began with Billy in the 1930s, continued with Hamlet (a stray adopted by Frank Case), and has been unbroken since. The current resident cat lives in the lobby and is named either Hamlet or Matilda, depending on the cat.

Sources

Primary sources directly fetched and verified for this article: the Algonquin Hotel’s own history page (algonquinhotel.com/the-hotel), which provided the 1902 opening date, the 1919 founding of the daily lunches in the Pergola Room, the Frank Case biography, the Harold Ross / New Yorker poker-game founding, the Blue Bar and John Barrymore origin, the Drama Critics’ Circle Winterset vote of March 25, 1936, and the unbroken Hamlet/Matilda cat lineage; and the Algonquin’s Round Table page (algonquinhotel.com/the-round-table), which provided the official biographies of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Harold Ross, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, and F.P.A. — including their Pulitzer counts, Academy Awards, columns, and theatrical work cited above.

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