Time-shares, popular in resort destinations such as Orlando and Honolulu, are beginning to make their way to New York City.

Last month, Hilton Hotels broke ground on a West 57th Street time-share — marking the chain’s second foray in recent years into the Manhattan time-share market. In 2002, Hilton converted two floors of its Sixth Avenue hotel into studio, one- and two-bedroom time-shares, which allow buyers to own a piece of vacation property and to occupy it on specific dates during the year.

“Urban time-shares have been successful elsewhere,” the chief development officer at Hilton Grand Vacations, David Desforges, said. “They are desired by that part of our customer base who are not necessarily looking to take a family vacation — a place where you will take your kids — but a place where you can take an adult vacation.”

Mr. Desforges noted that, while a large portion of the nation’s timeshares are in Orlando, the concept is slowly gaining a foothold in places like San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City. After the Manhattan Club in Midtown converted to timeshares in 1996, the Phillips Club on the Upper West Side, the St. Regis Hotel in Midtown, and the Hilton on Sixth Avenue all followed suit with time-share offerings. Last year, Grand Hyatt Corporation signed a deal to buy 485 Fifth Ave., and announced that they plan to convert it to a hotel with time-shares on the top floor. The editor of the new volume, “The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), Jerilou Hammett, said she fears the construction of new time-share complexes would mean the further gutting of the city’s once-famous grit. “Timeshares occur in places that are relatively soulless, and they are both symptom and cause of that soullessness,” she said. “They attract people that don’t have to make an investment in learning what a city is about, they can just hop on a flight to Miami for two weeks, to Las Vegas for two weeks, and never have to get a sense of what a place is really like.”

Ms. Hammett said she is concerned that, with an increase in time-shares in the city, and with more and more people buying Manhattan apartments as investments — not homes — the city will begin to resemble cookie-cutter resort communities. “It doesn’t create a sense of shared space, and a sense of shared history and shared investment and shared destiny in terms of where people live,” she said.

The lead architect on Hilton’s West 57th Street time-share, John Gering, a partner with the architectural firm HLW International, said he is aware of the incongruity of building a ground-up timeshare in New York. As a result, he said he tried to design a more sophisticated version of the typical suburban hotel — one that tied the Hilton brand into New York’s urban fabric.

Mr. Gering’s 28-story building features a series of stepped terraces on the outside, which he said would enable guests to “get closer to the life of New York, but still enable you to have full Internet access, lounge space, and have coffee, almost like you are at a Starbucks.”

A floor-to-ceiling glass-curtain wall maximizes the views of Central Park, and creates a sense of transparency around the front and back of the structure. Spa Chakra, a luxury fitness spa with franchises at resorts around the world, will have its first New York site on the ground level, according to plans.

The building, slated for an early 2009 completion, will consist of 161 studio, one-bedroom, and penthouse suites ranging in price from $41,000 to more than $100,000.

Experts believe that a combination of factors, including decreased vacancy rates for both hotel rooms and apartments, and demographic shifts will continue to open up the time-share market in New York.

“There is a sweet spot right now of a large part of the population that is turning 60 and moving to a kind of leisure lifestyle that is different from when they were younger and had families, and different from the kind of vacations their parents took,” the president of the American Resort Development Association, Howard Nussbaum, said. “The most important ingredient for them is to own in a place they will want to visit, and New York City is at the top of that list right now.”