There is a one-block street in Midtown East called Mitchell Place. It dead-ends into the back of the United Nations. Three buildings line it. Two are residential. The third is a 26-story Art Deco tower that, when it opened in 1928, was a women-only residential hotel called the Panhellenic — built for the rising tide of college-educated women who had moved to New York to actually do something with their lives. Today most New Yorkers walk down First Avenue without ever realizing it’s there. Ride the elevator to the top, push open a glass door, and you are standing on one of the most beautiful rooftops in the city. Almost no one is here. It is Sunday. The sun is setting. Let me show you something incredible.
The Beekman Tower’s secret 26th floor
The Beekman Tower is the kind of building New Yorkers love to discover by accident. The brick facade tapers in setbacks the way the 1916 Zoning Resolution intended — each level stepping back from the last so light could reach the street. Look up from First Avenue and 49th and you see a vertical wedding cake of Art Deco geometry, a building that looks like it should be in a Hopper painting. It is now the Highgate Hotel & Residences, but the bones — the brick, the setbacks, the elevator that climbs through the original 1928 shaft — are unchanged.
On the 26th floor, occupying what was the original Top of the Tower observatory, sits Ophelia Lounge. The space leans hard into the building’s age and wins because of it. A 24-foot pewter bar runs the length of the room. The floor is checkerboard. Velvet booths in deep red and emerald hug the windows. The lighting is the color of bourbon. It feels like the bar Nick Carraway would have walked into looking for Gatsby, except Gatsby is running 45 minutes late and the bartender already knows your drink.
The terrace is the point
Inside is beautiful. Outside is the reason you came. Ophelia’s outdoor terrace wraps the building on the 26th floor and gives you 360 degrees of view that almost no other rooftop in the city can match. The East River below. The UN directly south. The Empire State and Chrysler buildings standing shoulder to shoulder to the west. Roosevelt Island floating like an aircraft carrier in the river. On a clear evening you can see all the way down to the Verrazzano. The terrace is glassed-in greenhouse style, which means it works in February and August equally well — you get the view without the wind.
What makes the room work on a Sunday at golden hour is the orientation. The sun crosses the city west, falling behind the Empire State Building right around the time the East River turns pink. The light catches the chrome trim on the terrace railing. The skyline goes from amber to violet in about 14 minutes. If you have ever wondered where to be at sunset on a Sunday in May, you are looking at the answer.
The cocktails earn their setting
The drinks program is led by mixologist Amir Babayoff and it is not phoning it in. The signature is Ophelia’s Ascension — Maker’s Mark and smoked-pepper San Bartolo mezcal with Sri Lankan palm sugar, aromatic bitters, and cedar smoke captured under a glass dome that you lift before drinking. It tastes like a campfire that learned manners.
Other standouts: Purple Tuxedo, a 1920s reinterpretation of the martini built on Empress 1908 gin and absinthe. Killing Me Softly, a coconut-and-lychee homage to the 1990s lychee martini done with Old Duff genever and rose gin. Far East Side, shiso-infused shochu and yuzu. There is also an omakase-style cocktail tasting if you want to commit — seven petite cocktails paired with single-bite kitchen treats over 90 minutes. It is one of the more interesting cocktail formats in Manhattan right now.
The food is bar-food-elevated. Million-layer crispy potato bites topped with caviar. Mini lobster tacos. Tuna tartare spoons with crispy shallots and chives. Truffle fries that arrive in a small mountain. None of it is trying to be a destination dinner. All of it does its job, which is to give you a reason to stay for one more cocktail while the sky changes color.
Why nobody is here on Sunday
The reason this rooftop hasn’t been overrun is partly geography and partly branding. Beekman Tower sits in the dead-quiet pocket between Sutton Place and the UN — not a neighborhood anyone passes through accidentally. The hotel itself goes by "The Beekman Tower" while the lounge is called "Ophelia", which means most rooftop search lists miss it. And it doesn’t have the social-media gimmickry of a Magic Hour or a Westlight, which means the people who find it are the people who specifically went looking. On a Sunday evening you can frequently get a window seat without a reservation, which in 2026 Manhattan is a small miracle.
Insider Tip
Take the elevator past the lounge entrance and look up. When you exit on the 26th floor, the Ophelia entrance is to your left. Before you go in, walk down the corridor 15 feet and look up at the original Beekman Tower lobby ceiling — the geometric Art Deco plaster work and the brass elevator surrounds are still original to 1928. The building was designed by John Mead Howells, the same architect who designed the Chicago Tribune Tower; the sculptural Art Deco ornament is by René Paul Chambellan. Almost no one notices these details on the way to drinks. You will.
How to Visit
Address: 3 Mitchell Place (49th Street & 1st Avenue), 26th floor, New York, NY 10017
Phone: (212) 980-4796
Website: opheliany.com (check current hours and reservation availability before you go)
Subway: 6 train to 51st Street, then walk east 4 blocks. Or E/M to Lexington Av/53rd, then south.
Dress code: Smart casual. Sneakers are fine, athletic wear is not.
Reservations: Recommended Friday and Saturday. Sunday walk-ins are usually fine before 7 p.m.
Cost: Cocktails $21–$45. Bar bites $18–$32. Budget $80–$120 per person for a full sunset visit with food.
If you want to make an evening of it, pair the visit with a stroll through the U.N. plaza or a walk down to Tudor City — the postcard-perfect 1928 enclave covered in our Manhattan’s Secret Walks: Stone Street to Tudor City guide. The whole pocket of Midtown East between 42nd and 53rd is one of the city’s best-kept Art Deco neighborhoods, and Ophelia is the rooftop crown that ties the walk together.
Sunday at sunset. 26 floors up. A glass door, a velvet booth, a cedar-smoked Old Fashioned, and the Empire State Building going pink in the west. This is what New York does that nowhere else does. You just have to know which building to look for.
