Visit Tesla's Room & Mini Museum Memorial at the New Yorker Hotel

Joe Staton, a cartoonist and Nikola Tesla fan, stayed at the New Yorker Hotel. He looked like he had just struck gold. In the hotel basement, he walked from Tesla exhibit to Tesla exhibit, Observing a bust of the great inventor, along with numerous photographs and snippets of information.  “It’s a nice remembrance of Tesla,” said Staton, who lives in Kingston, NY. “He spent so much time in the hotel; they should have some way of remembering him.”

Although many think of a “Tesla” as a vehicle, memorials to inventor Nikola Tesla span the globe. One such monument is the Tesla Monument at Goat Island, Niagara Falls, a 1976 gift from Yugoslavia honoring his design of the initial generators.

Tesla and George Westinghouse designed the first hydro-power generator at Niagara Falls, ushering in the age of electricity.

There is also the Tesla Museum and Tesla University, both in Belgrade, and local Tesla groups worldwide.

An effort is underway to restore Tesla’s Tower at Wardenclyffe, his fabled laboratory in Shoreham, New York. But Tesla’s life, legend, and legacy live on in Manhattan. A green ceremonial street sign near Bryant Park marks Nikola Tesa Street Cortner, at 40^th St. and Sixth Ave., where Tesla used to sit, think, and feed pigeons.

The New Yorker, a Wyndham hotel, recently hosted the Tesla conference on January 11, organized by the Philadelphia Tesla Foundation. It attracted hundreds to talk Tesla, discuss his innovations, show their inventions, and ponder alternative energy solutions.

Meanwhile, the two rooms in the suite at the New Yorker, where Tesla lived from 1933 until he died in 1943, are each available to spend the night for a little less than $500.

He lived in 3327 and worked in 3328 on the 33^rd floor, although his papers reportedly disappeared after his death. In 2001, a plaque was installed at the hotel to commemorate Tesla as a “great Yugoslav-American scientist—inventor” who died on Jan. 7, 1943, at the age of 87.

“I liked the layout and some of the historical information. I would like to see more hard assets, motors he built, electronics he built,” said Robert Meyer, president of the Arizona Tesla Science Foundation. “It’s educational, I’ll put it that way. The university was a lot more interesting, because of what I was looking at, the motors, things he built.”

Meyer walked into Tesla’s suite during a past Tesla conference but could not book it since the event’s organizers had already rented it.

“I was in that room several times,” he said. “I could feel Tesla’s presence in that room where he did a lot of thinking, and the room where Tesla did a lot of his writing and paperwork.”

Tesla fans see him as a revolutionary and a visionary, and the New Yorker has become a pilgrimage point for those seeking signs that Tesla’s legacy lives on beyond technology.

“People don’t realize Tesla was way ahead of his time with his role in electric lights, power, and smartphones,” Meyer said. “He has 300 patents that are now being deployed.”

Staton sees Tesla as someone who endorsed an alternative reality to Edison’s, one in which electricity is a right rather than a product.

“Edison thought electricity should be to make a buck,” Staton said. “And Tesla thought it should be given to the world. They had a different understanding of the world. Edison wound up on top.”

He said Tesla “was creative” and “kept developing things,” seeing science as a tool to help humanity rather than to make money.

“The Tesla car is in the service of millionaires making money. That would be something Tesla was opposed to,” Staton added. “There’s a real irony that his name wound up on a car.”

Tesla, from the Middle East to Michigan and everywhere, sees him as often overlooked.

“Much of Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current technology,” is the way Astrid Langseth, a Tesla fan in Norway, puts it. “Modern biographers have dubbed Tesla ‘the man who invented the 20th century’ and ‘the guardian angel of modern electricity.’”

While the hotel attracts Tesla fans, thousands more see or walk by the street sign bearing his name in the middle of Manhattan.

“It was cool,” Staton said, noting that more people recognize Tesla’s work. “It’s good to have him remembered in the area.”