Tuesday, August 10, 2021 – Hotels – A New York Invention?
TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2021
The
438th Edition
From the Archives
Hotels: A New York
Invention?
Stephen Blank
Been thinking about hotels – with the new Graduate Hotel here, and because I’m looking at hotels for a planned trip to Venice, Trieste and Ravenna next month.
When I taught at Pace downtown, I thought the Astor Hotel, which had been located nearby on Broadway, was the first New York hotel. Turns out that I was wrong. The story is more interesting than that. So let’s talk about hotels and New York.
First of all, commercial hotels seem to have been an American invention. Granted, all sorts of inns and taverns had existed around the world for centuries. But these were typically small affairs, attached to (or in) the owner’s home. The large, commercial hotel was something quite different and quite soon, a significant business in many cities.
Why here? No single answer. It’s said that when George Washington traveled as President, he refused to stay in people’s homes – as English and French Kings had always done, roving from great estate to great estate – but stayed instead in inns. The inns were so grubby and dirty and mean that Americans were embarrassed and came up with a new idea, a modern, clean hotel! Others say that a rising American entrepreneurial class needed better places to stay on their travels, that business and political leaders needed meeting places, and that wealthy families sought out sites for weddings and parties. The new hotel idea met all of these needs.
The first hotel in New York and in the US? The City Hotel, which opened in 1794 on Broadway near Trinity Church, was the first American structure purpose built as a hotel. Designed by John McComb Jr., a leading New York architect, it was huge, with 73 rooms, mostly for overnight guests. It included a ballroom, public parlors, a bar, stores, offices, and the country’s largest circulating library. Taller than almost all New York churches, and at $200,000, it was the city’s costliest building, except for the newly built New York Stock Exchange headquarters Wall Street. The City Hotel soon became a center of social activities and, until the early 1840s, it was the city’s principal site for prestigious social functions and concerts.
One of the most famous of these was the magnificent dinner for Charles Dickens in February 1842. More than 200 of New York elite attended. The New York Sun reported the “unalloyed good feeling and hilarity” that marked the evening. An unusual feature of this man-only world was the presence of a group of ladies, including Dickens’ wife, in a room adjoining the banquet hall. They edged their way into the ballroom to listen to the speechmaking.
City Hotel demonstrated that American innovators would change the direction of the hospitality business; soon Americans were known for the largest and finest hotels in the world. The idea spread quickly and by the early 1800s, the best hotels had as many as seven floors and over 200 rooms, and cost more than a half a million dollars.
The new hotels helped create a new urban culture and new images of women. In his review of Sandoval-Strausz’s Hotel: An American History, Edward Short writes, “By the early nineteenth century, hotels had already become what they continue to be in the twenty-first: meeting places for politicians and businessmen, reception spaces for the newly wed, retail outlets for shoppers, getaways for tourists, hideaways for adulterers. In the nineteenth century, enterprising prostitutes threatened the reputations of even the best hotels; books of hotel etiquette warned unwary guests against them. ‘Have little to say to a woman who is traveling alone without a companion,’ advised one, ‘and whose face is painted, who wears a profusion of long curls about her neck, who has a meretricious expression of eye, and who is overdressed.’ By the same token, respectable women were urged to behave accordingly. ‘Any bold action or boisterous deportment in a hotel will expose a lady to the most severe censure of the refined around her, and may render her liable to misconstruction, and impertinence.’
The Astor House (not Hotel) wasn’t New York’s first hotel, but it was the City’s first luxury hotel. Located at Broadway and Vesey, and opening in 1836 as the Park Hotel, it soon became the best known hotel in the US. Isaiah Rogers was the architect. In 1829, he had designed the country’s first luxury hotel, the Tremont House, in Boston. Astor House was five stories with 309 rooms and servant’s rooms on the sixth floor. It had gaslights – the gas was produced in the hotel’s own plant and bathing and toilet facilities on each floor, with the water pumped up by steam engines.
House, circa 1905. The former City Hall Post Office and Courthouse, on the right, was located at what is now the lower end of City Hall Park. The building was torn down in 1939. Photo: Library of Congress
The Astor House was built by John Jacob Astor, the United States’ first multi-millionaire. Astor had a voracious appetite for land, but not much taste for development. His motto—”Buy and hold. Let others improve”—meant that Astor left few personalized buildings behind when he died, despite owning massive parcels of land throughout the city. One exception to his “Buy and hold” policy: Astor owned a brick townhouse on Broadway between Vesey and Barclay Streets, at the time New York’s most fashionable residential district. In the 1830s, he began buying up his neighbors’ mansions with the intention of building a huge hotel on the site. Associates warned that the site would not work: “It can never be a success. It is altogether too far uptown.”
But it wasn’t too far. Instead, it became a central component of the City’s social life. Guests included practically every prominent figure of the time, including Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis, and Daniel Webster, who, it was said, “would stay at no other hotel.” President-elect Lincoln, on his way to Washington for his first inauguration in 1861, stayed overnight and made an impromptu speech from the top of the entrance portico to a crowd of 40,000, according to Walt Whitman. Eighteen US presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt, stayed at The Astor House, probably the most of any hotel in US history.
Competition followed. The St Nicholas Hotel on Broadway at Broome Street was built for a million dollars and offered the innovation of central heating that circulated warmed air through registers to every room. The Metropolitan Hotel opened in 1852 just north of it, at Prince Street, was equally luxurious. But the new hotel to put all others in the shade was the Fifth Avenue Hotel facing Madison Square.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was built in 1856–59 by Amos Richards Eno at the cost of $2 million. Eno had made a fortune in dry goods and then real estate. As with the Astor House, critics claimed that the hotel was too far from the city center to be popular – the hotel was called “Eno’s Folly”. But like the Astor House, it became the social, cultural political hub of elite New York, and brought in a quarter of a million dollars a year in profits. The Fifth Avenue Hotel spurred development of additional hotels to the north and west.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel closed at midnight, April 4, 1908, and was demolished. It was reported that patrons of the hotel’s bar spent $7,000 (about $200,000 today!) in drinks during its last day of operation.
Fifth Avenue Hotel, Wikipedia
Well before that, by the early 1870s, the Astor House was viewed as old-fashioned and unappealing and was used mainly by businessmen. But it remained a seeming permanent fixture of New York. It was divided by feuding Astor cousins William Waldorf Astor and Vincent Astor—Vincent owning the southern half and William the northern. On May 3, 1913 signs were posted announcing that the hotel would close on Thursday, May 29. Vincent had sold his share of the property when impending subway excavations threatened its stability. He redeveloped the site as the Astor House Building in 1915-16, which remains today. The rest was demolished in 1926 and the site rebuilt as the Transportation Building.
But this would not be the Astor family’s last involvement with hotels!
This was fun. Thanks for reading.
Stephen Blank
RIHS
August 5, 2021
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FROM A READER
I lived in Yorkville from 1976 to 1989 when Roosevelt Island (and my wife to be) lured me away. I call those my bachelor years. I loved the restaurants, the shopping (remember Gimbels?) and the many movie theaters on 86th Street. Carl Schurz Park, directly adjacent to Gracie Mansion, was a gem – remember the statue of Robin Hood, located in a little glen? 87th Street between York and First was my block association and I organized street volleyball during the warm months. The liquor store on the corner sponsored a softball team, the Sons of Off-Broadway (or the SOBs), which played in Central Park, at the Asphalt Green and on Roosevelt Island, which was my first taste of what would become my home and my obsession. Matt Katz
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
STEPHEN BLANK
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/the-12-best-bridges-in-nyc
https://oldstructures.nyc/2018/03/22/sometimes-an-ugly-duckling-becomes-an-ugly-duck/ https://www.structuremag.org/?p=10998 https://newyorkled.com/williamsburg-bridge/ https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2018/01/construction-williamsburg-bridge-history-behind-scene-alienist.html https://www.brownstoner.com/brooklyn-life/walkabout-the-m/Ellsworth Huntington, “The Water Barriers of New York City,” Geographical Review, Sept., 1916
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