| Fifth Avenue Hotel | |
|---|---|
 (1860) | |
 | |
| General information | |
| Construction started | 1856 |
| Completed | 1859 |
| Inaugurated | August 23, 1859 |
| Demolished | 1908 |
| Owner | Amos R. Eno |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect(s) | Griffith Thomas with William Washburn |
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was a luxury hotel located in Manhattan, New York City from 1859 to 1908. It had an entire block of frontage between 23rd Street and 24th Street, at the southwest corner of Madison Square.
The site was previously the location of Madison Cottage, [a] which was a stagecoach stop for passengers headed north from the city. From 1853 to 1856 it was the site of Franconi's Hippodrome, a tent-like structure of canvas and wood which could accommodate up to 10,000 spectators who watched chariot races and other "Amusements of the Ancient Greeks and Romans". [2] [b] [3] [4]
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was built in 1856–59 by Amos Richards Eno at the cost of $2 million. The building was designed by Griffith Thomas with William Washburn. [5] Due to the site's location away from the city center, the hotel was labelled as "Eno's Folly" [c] during construction, due to its location away from the city centre.
Following the hotel's opening, it became "the social, cultural political hub of elite New York," [6] and brought in a quarter of a million dollars a year in profits. [6] The Fifth Avenue Hotel spurred development of additional hotels to the north and west, [7] to the north of the Madison Square Park, an area known in the 21st century as the NoMad neighborhood.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was constructed of brick and white marble, and stood at five stories over a commercial ground floor. The first example of Otis Tufts' "vertical screw railway," the first passenger elevator installed in a hotel in the United States, [d] a notable but cumbersome feature powered by a stationary steam engine carried passengers to the upper floors by a revolving screw that passed through the center of the passenger cab. [8]
The building was of a plain Italianate palazzo-front design, with a projecting tin cornice, but its sober exterior contained richly appointed public rooms: Harper's Weekly reviewed its "heavy masses of gilt wood, rich crimson or green curtains, extremely handsome rose-wood and brocatelle suits, [e] rich carpets... the whole presenting about as handsome and as comfortless an appearance as any one need wish for." [6] A correspondent for The Times of London, in New York to cover the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1860, called the hotel "a larger and more handsome building than Buckingham Palace." [5]
The hotel employed 400 servants to serve its guests, [5] offered private bathrooms (an unprecedented amenity at the time) [5] and ran advertisements featuring a fireplace in every room. [9] Some critics argued that the success of the hotel is a sign that elite New Yorkers were rejecting the republican values of their forefathers, and had begun to value grandeur, luxury and comfort instead. [5]
The hotel was host to numerous notable guests, both foreign and domestic, and was, for a time, the most exclusive hotel in the city, and the center of social life for elite New Yorkers. [10]
During the Civil War, Major General George B. McClellan moved into the hotel shortly after he was relieved from command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, after his failure to crush Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Antietam. Nevertheless, McClellan, a Democrat, was received as a hero in New York, the North's largest Democratic stronghold. The day that he arrived, the street in front of the hotel was crammed with cheering and shouting people hoping for a sight of him, while a band played and a local militiaman set off a small piece of field artillery at intervals. The crowd reacted with even more enthusiasm when McClellan made an appearance on a hotel balcony. Two years later, shortly before Election Day, as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, McClellan reviewed a massive 2 1/2 hour long torchlight parade of his supporters from a balcony of the hotel. It was one of only two personal appearances he made during the entire election campaign, which he lost to Abraham Lincoln. McClellan once again received the approbation of a crowd of supporters from a Fifth Avenue Hotel balcony on September 29, 1868, when the Civil War veterans of the McClellan Legion – an organization of veterans, formed for the 1864 campaign, charged with getting out the vote of soldiers who had been discharged or were on sick leave or furlough – marched past in review from dusk until almost midnight. [11] [12]
President Ulysses S. Grant's 1867 presidential campaign began at a dinner party in the hotel, and he and his cabinet once held an official session there. [13] On September 20, 1873, Grant came to New York in response to the start of the financial Panic of 1873, and held a serious of meetings at the hotel the next day with financiers, brokers, bankers and railroad executive, all wanting Grant to take steps to stabilize the economy, but Grant lacked the tools which later presidents would have to deal with the economy, as there was no central bank, no Federal Reserve system, to take necessary measures. After the presidential campaign of 1880, in which Grant campaigned for James Garfield, he and his wife Julia moved into the hotel for the winter. [14]
The celebrity lawyer Chester A. Arthur – who later became President of the United States – kept a suite for his office; [15] Edward, Prince of Wales, stayed here on his North American tour, as did his brother-in-law the Duke of Argyll, Dom Pedro of Brazil and Prince Agustín de Iturbide y Green of Mexico, Maximilian's adopted son. [16] The celebrated New York City physician, Dr. John Franklin Gray, lived at the hotel.
The hotel was also "...a gathering place for fat cats like Boss Tweed, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk and Commodore Vanderbilt, who would trade stocks here after hours." [17] When the superbly confident young Fisk – soon to be known as "Diamond Jim", one of the Gilded Age's premier robber barons – first arrived in New York, he stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel until he was temporarily ruined. [18]
On October 20, 1873, representatives from Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers Universities met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to codify the first set of college football rules. Before this meeting, each school had its own set of rules and games were usually played using the home team's own particular code. At this meeting, a list of rules, based more on The Football Association's rules than the rules of the recently founded Rugby Football Union, was drawn up for intercollegiate football games.
Gore Vidal made the Fifth Avenue Hotel a setting in his novel 1876 , for it was in a suite here that John C. Reid, editor of The New York Times woke the Republican National Committee chairman Zachariah Chandler, and worked out the campaign for the controversial presidential election of 1876.
On May 21, 1881, the United States Tennis Association was founded in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. [19]
In 1886, retired General of the United States Army William Tecumseh Sherman resided at the Fifth Avenue Hotel upon his move from St. Louis, Missouri to New York City; he stayed until he had purchased a house in the city. [20]
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was known as a stronghold of the Republican Party. [10] From a corner nook in one of the public rooms, which he dubbed his "Amen Corner", Republican political boss Thomas Collier Platt controlled patronage in New York City and state for a few years in the 1890s; here he held his "Sunday School", where projects did not go forward until they had his "amen". [21] [22] [23]
The Fifth Avenue Hotel closed at midnight on April 4, 1908 [24] and was demolished. It was reported that patrons of the hotel's bar spent $7,000 in drinks during its last day of operation. [21]
Its site was occupied in 1909 by an office building known as the Fifth Avenue Building (later changed to Toy Center), designed by Robert Maynicke and Julius Franke, [25] for Eno's grandson, Henry Lane Eno. Until 2007 it housed the International Toy Center, [26] which was filled with wholesale buyers come the February Toy Fair [27] and then again in October. The old hotel's name was taken up by a Fifth Avenue Hotel at 24 Fifth Avenue, designed by Emery Roth, later converted to apartments. [28]
A plaque on the Toy Center, the building currently on the site, commemorates the hotel. [29]
The Flatiron Building, originally the Fuller Building, is a 22-story, 285-foot-tall (86.9 m) steel-framed triangular building at 175 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick P. Dinkelberg, and sometimes called, in its early days, "Burnham's Folly", it was opened in 1902. The building sits on a triangular block formed by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and East 22nd Street—where the building's 87-foot (27 m) back end is located—with East 23rd Street grazing the triangle's northern (uptown) peak. The name "Flatiron" derives from its triangular shape, which recalls that of a cast-iron clothes iron.
23rd Street is a broad thoroughfare in the New York City borough of Manhattan, one of the major two-way, east-west streets in the borough's grid. As with Manhattan's other "crosstown" streets, it is divided into its east and west sections at Fifth Avenue. The street runs from Avenue C and FDR Drive in the east to Eleventh Avenue in the west.
The Fuller Building is a skyscraper at 57th Street and Madison Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Designed by Walker & Gillette, it was erected between 1928 and 1929. The building is named for its original main occupant, the Fuller Construction Company, which moved from the Flatiron Building.
The Fred F. French Building is a skyscraper at 551 Fifth Avenue on the northeast corner with 45th Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Designed by H. Douglas Ives along with John Sloan and T. Markoe Robertson of the firm Sloan & Robertson, it was erected in 1927. The building is named for Fred F. French, owner of the Fred F. French Companies, for whom the structure was commissioned.
Madison Square is a public square formed by the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23rd Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The square was named for Founding Father James Madison, fourth President of the United States. The focus of the square is Madison Square Park, a 6.2-acre (2.5-hectare) public park, which is bounded on the east by Madison Avenue ; on the south by 23rd Street; on the north by 26th Street; and on the west by Fifth Avenue and Broadway as they cross.
The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower is a skyscraper occupying a full block in the Flatiron District of Manhattan in New York City. The building is composed of two sections: a 700-foot-tall (210 m) tower at the northwest corner of the block, at Madison Avenue and 24th Street, and a shorter east wing occupying the remainder of the block bounded by Madison Avenue, Park Avenue South, 23rd Street, and 24th Street. The South Building, along with the North Building directly across 24th Street, comprises the Metropolitan Home Office Complex, which originally served as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
66th Street is a crosstown street in the New York City borough of Manhattan with portions on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side connected across Central Park via the 66th Street transverse. West 66th Street is notable for hosting the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts between Broadway and Columbus Avenue.
500 Fifth Avenue is a 60-story, 697-foot-tall (212 m) office building on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon in the Art Deco style and constructed from 1929 to 1931.
The Wilbraham is an apartment building at 282–284 Fifth Avenue and 1 West 30th Street in the Midtown South neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The nine-story structure was designed by David and John Jardine in the Romanesque Revival style, with elements of the Renaissance Revival style, and occupies the northwestern corner of 30th Street and Fifth Avenue. It was built between 1888 and 1890 as a bachelor apartment hotel. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated the Wilbraham as an official city landmark, and the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
195 Broadway, also known as the Telephone Building, Telegraph Building, or Western Union Building, is an early skyscraper on Broadway in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. The building was the longtime headquarters of AT&T Corp. and Western Union. It occupies the entire western side of Broadway from Dey to Fulton Streets.
NoMad, also known as Madison Square North, is a neighborhood centered on the Madison Square North Historic District in the borough of Manhattan in New York City.
Amos Richards Eno was an American real estate investor and capitalist in New York City. He built the Fifth Avenue Hotel and many other developments on the streets of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, where he established a prominent family fortune of 20 to 40 million U.S dollars.
The Madison Square Theatre was a Broadway theatre in Manhattan, on the south side of 24th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. It was built in 1863, operated as a theater from 1865 to 1909, and demolished in 1909 to make way for an office building. The Madison Square Theatre was the scene of important developments in stage technology, theatre design, and theatrical tour management. For about half its history it had other names including the Fifth Avenue Theatre, Daly's Fifth Avenue Theatre, Hoyt's Madison Square Theatre, and Hoyt's Theatre.
The Waldorf-Astoria originated as two hotels, built side by side by feuding relatives, on Fifth Avenue in New York, New York, United States. Built in 1893 and expanded in 1897, the hotels were razed in 1929 to make way for construction of the Empire State Building. Their successor, the current Waldorf Astoria New York, was built on Park Avenue in 1931.
Sherry's was a restaurant in New York City. It was established by Louis Sherry in 1880 at 38th Street and Sixth Avenue. In the 1890s, it moved to West 37th Street, near Fifth Avenue. By 1898 it had moved to the corner of 44th Street and Fifth Avenue, before moving to the Hotel New Netherland on the corner of 59th Street in 1919.
The B. Altman and Company Building is a commercial building in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, that formerly served as B. Altman and Company's flagship department store. It occupies an entire city block between Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, 34th Street, and 35th Street, directly opposite the Empire State Building, with a primary address of 355–371 Fifth Avenue.
390 Fifth Avenue, also known as the Gorham Building, is an Italian Renaissance Revival palazzo-style building at Fifth Avenue and West 36th Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, United States. It was designed by McKim, Mead & White, with Stanford White as the partner in charge, and built in 1904–1906. The building was named for the Gorham Manufacturing Company, a major manufacturer of sterling and silverplate, and was a successor to the former Gorham Manufacturing Company Building at 889 Broadway. The building features bronze ornamentation and a copper cornice.
400 Madison Avenue is a 22-story office building in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is along Madison Avenue's western sidewalk between 47th and 48th Streets, near Grand Central Terminal. 400 Madison Avenue was designed by H. Craig Severance with Neo-Gothic architectural detailing.
275 Madison Avenue is a 43-story office building in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is along the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 40th Street, near Grand Central Terminal. The building, constructed from 1930 to 1931, was designed by Kenneth Franzheim in a mixture of the Art Deco and International styles.
200 Madison Avenue is a 25-story office building in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is along the west side of Madison Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets. Designed by Warren and Wetmore, it was built from 1925 to 1926.
Informational notes
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Bibliography
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