Gallow Green has closed. The McKittrick Hotel’s own site now says so plainly and points visitors to Conwell Coffee & Cocktail Hall and The Overlook Bar instead. Anyone arriving in Chelsea with this address in their pocket should read the rest of this as an account of what was there, not as a booking.
What was there was an odd rooftop, and it was odd for a reason. The McKittrick Hotel is not a hotel. It is the name the British company Punchdrunk gave to a block of warehouses on West 27th Street for Sleep No More, the promenade production it staged in New York with Emursive. The show opened on 7 March 2011 and ran until 5 January 2025, some 5,000 performances later.
Sleep No More is Macbeth, told without words, and it is set in a dimly lit 1930s establishment in the fictitious Scottish town of Gallow Green, Glamis, Forfar. The bar on the roof took its name from the town in the fiction. That is the joke. It also explains how the place looked.
The McKittrick described it as a hidden rooftop sanctuary, a garden of natural elements and whimsical décor. That is house copy, and it is also an accurate account of what a visitor found: a planted roof dressed as somewhere abandoned and reclaimed, rather than as a bar with plants in it. Downstairs, the Manderley was the themed hotel jazz bar where the audience waited before entering the show and returned to after leaving it. Between them, those two rooms did most of the drinking in the building.
The drink was never the appeal. A rooftop garden in Chelsea behaving as if it were an abandoned Scottish village, attached to a show that had been running for over a decade, gave a visitor a stage set to drink in. It was also a themed venue that did not apologise for the theme.
That is now over. Sleep No More gave its last performance on 5 January 2025 and the building has moved on: Conwell Coffee & Cocktail Hall and The Overlook Bar at Speakeasy Magick are what the McKittrick sends people to today, and the site says only that the next chapter is being written.
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If you kept a photograph of the ivy and the lanterns, keep it. Rooftops in Manhattan are usually replaced by rooftops with better sightlines and worse ideas, and the one on West 27th Street had the better idea.
The McKittrick Hotel, 530 West 27th Street, New York. mckittrickhotel.com