Nearly 2,000 years ago, Rome burned for seven nights straight. Nero, the 26-year-old emperor, did not fiddle through the disaster, as famously claimed — bowed string instruments didn’t exist — but as soon as the flames died down, he started building a vast palace over the ruins, big enough to house a 120-foot-tall statue of himself. There he alternately wooed and menaced his fellow aristocrats in a round banquet hall that rotated on a giant pillar, likely powered by flowing water, while pipes in the ceiling rained down perfume.

We have megalomania to thank, then, for the world’s first revolving dining room. Not until the 20th century did anyone attempt such a feat again.

Starting in the late 1950s, restaurants were set whirling atop towers around the world, a trend that spread from Honolulu and Cairo to Reykjavik, Jaipur and beyond. The timing made sense: Humans in spaceships were being propelled into larger orbit, and those left on the ground wanted a peek at untethered vistas, too, preferably between mouthfuls of shrimp cocktail.

By 1985, when the Marriott Marquis Hotel opened in New York with its own spinner 47 floors above Times Square, the fad was long past cool. The New York Times architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, groused that the whole building was “bombastic” and “out of touch.” Nevertheless, the dining room continued to churn through its 360 degrees — slowly, by millimeters, clocking one revolution every 90 minutes — until the pandemic pulled the plug.

Five years later, the restaurateur Danny Meyer has come to the rescue with the gentlest of glow-ups. The spot retains its literal-minded name, the View, because why bury the lede? The new décor — dusky-blue velvet drapes, carpet as red as the inside of a mouth — pays homage to both the theaters far below and those razed to make way for the hotel decades ago, in what became known as the Great Theater Massacre.