The 195 Broadway site included connecting properties on Church and Fulton Street across from the World Trade Center. Peter Kalikow developed these properties as his next project.

He originally planned to create a combined office building and hotel. However, hotel-chain executives and market studies raised doubts as to whether hotel rooms would be profitable at that location.

Kalikow then changed his plans for the site to a 29-story office building. To make the office space work, he planned a floor-by-floor expansion of 195 Broadway, but zoning issues and complications with the air rights to historical landmark St. Paul’s Chapel (situated behind the hotel) made obtaining the appropriate approvals and permits from the city a challenge.

Rather than confronting the daunting zoning challenges, Kalikow returned once again to the hotel concept.

He wanted to “make a statement that had nothing to do with 195,” and proceeded to develop a 58-story hotel as an as-of-right building, free of scrutiny from the City Planning Commission and the Board of Standards and Appeals.

Kalikow selected the name “Millenium” for the hotel, deliberately misspelling it rather than using the conventional spelling (millennium), to be more distinctive and easier to trademark.

The project cost $200 million and opened on June 2, 1992. Around the same time, Kalikow was dealing with the financial repercussions from his ownership of the New York Post, prompting him to sell the hotel to a Singapore-based company, City Developments Limited (CDL) in June of 1994.

Hilton began managing the property as “The Millenium Hilton,” keeping the misspelling of the word “millennium.”

During the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Millenium Hotel sustained only cosmetic damage. Despite its close proximity to the catastrophe, the structure of the hotel remained intact—a testament to the quality of Kalikow’s buildings.

The hotel closed for 18 months of extensive repairs and reopened on May 5, 2003. Workers recovered the American flag that had been flying outside during the attacks and rehung it in the lobby where it currently stands today.

In 2017, the hotel was renamed “The Millennium Hilton New York Downtown.” By using the conventional spelling of “millennium,” CDL subsidiary, Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, was able to market the building with the rest of their properties.

Hilton managed the hotel until January 2022, and it is now called “Millennium Downtown New York.”