In a city full of brand name hotels, the Herald Square Hotel West 31st Street is neither a chain nor a franchise. It is privately owned by Abraham Puchall, a German shepherd breeder who said he senses a psychic link with Life’s founding editor, John Ames Mitchell.

“There’s some kind of weird connection,” Mr. Puchall, 52, said.

Life Magazine, in its heady, early days, was full of social satire and original illustrations — bearing little resemblance to the picture book it became, or to the now-defunct newspaper supplement that followed.

Today, Mr. Puchall’s hotel serves as an ode to that early incarnation of Life, which was housed in that very Beaux-Arts building between 1894 and 1936. The walls of the hotel are covered with magazine memorabilia: original artwork by Life illustrators including Charles Dana Gibson, replicas of witty cover drawings, and old advertisements, such as an undated one, boasting escorts to serve as “mourners or pallbearers at fashionable funerals.”

About five years ago, Mr. Puchall went so far as to buy Mitchell’s old house in Ridgefield, Conn. — a place that the hotelier swears he admired before he knew that about its former resident. And just recently, he purchased a bronze sculpture of a cherub that artist Philip Martiny gifted to Mitchell in 1894. This statue, displayed in the hotel entryway, matches an ornament affixed to the building’s façade, which is now covered by scaffolding.

The hotel’s exterior, altered over the years by construction projects, remains ornate; the interior, while spotless, is more modest — its paint a little faded, and it’s tiles mismatched. But what it lacks in coordination, it makes up for in price. Depending on the season, the room rates range from $69 for a small single room with a shared bathroom, to $259 a renovated double room, featuring pillow-top mattresses, private marble bathrooms, and flat-screen televisions — hundreds of dollars less than a room at many city chains. About 40 of the 117 rooms have been renovated in recent years, a hotel manager said.

The architectural duo behind the New York Public Library on West 42nd Street, Carrere & Hastings, designed the building in 1893. In later years, the building would become residential hotel, and then a tourist hotel.

The Puchall family purchased the building in 1970. Since then, Mr. Puchall has been hiring researchers to look into the history of the building, the magazine once housed in it, and that magazine’s editor. “We’re trying to make it more and more like a museum,” he said. One researcher, Nadine Charlsen has been studying the building, and its former tenants for nearly two decades. “Every time I think I’m coming to the end, there’s a new connection,” she said.