Fifth Avenue Hotel

“ The Fifth Avenue Hotel was built about fifteen years later, and the remainder of the street is of very recent growth, possessing but little local interest.
Broadway has grown with the extension of the city northward. The upper blocks of buildings have always been dwelling houses or shanties, and these have given way steadily to the pressure of business below them. In a few years the entire street, from the Central Park to the Bowling Green, will be taken up with substantial and elegant structures suited to the growing needs of the great city. ”

“ Sceptics ridiculed the idea, predicting that a situation so far uptown meant certain disaster. But the Hippodrome building was torn down, the new structure begun, and in September, 1859, the Fifth Avenue Hotel opened its doors under the direction of Colonel Paran Stevens. It was of white marble, six stories in height. Among the innovations and conveniences that made it the wonder of its day was the first passenger elevator ever installed. New York then knew the device as "the vertical railway." ”

“ If New York has never had another restaurant that meant to the novelist just what the traditional Delmonico's meant, there has also never been another hotel like the old Fifth Avenue. In actual life the so-called "Ladies' Parlour" on the second floor, reached, if I remember rightly, by means of an entrance on the Twenty-third Street side, was dreary enough ”

“ Sometimes a train is derailed, as the papers call it, and two or three people have to remain over, as we did, all night. It is at such a time that the Fifth Avenue Hotel is the scene of great excitement. ”

“ The annual profits of the Fifth Avenue Hotel are said to be about $250,000; those of the St. Nicholas about $200,000. Other leading houses, when well managed, are said to clear about twenty per cent. on the sum invested. Large fortunes have been made by not a few keepers of hotels in New York.
The large hotels depend entirely upon transient guests for their success. The city has, perhaps, the largest floating population in America. Thousands come and go daily, even in the summer months, and these are mostly persons who have money to spend. ”

“ Tomorrow the old bricks will be tumbled down, the chutes will roar with their passing, and the air will be shrill with the steam drills and riveters ushering into the world the young giants that will take their places. At the northeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where the Avenue touches the Square, there is a vast edifice of surpassing ugliness. It is the Brunswick Building, on the site of the old Brunswick Hotel, once famous as the headquarters of the Coaching Club. ”

“ The hotel is the most perfectly appointed in the city. The p. 309ground floor along Broadway and Fifth avenue is let out in stores. The main entrance is on Fifth avenue, and is ornamented with a fine marble porch. From this, the visitor enters into the spacious reception hall, tiled with marble and handsomely frescoed. A marble counter at the lower end encloses the offices of the hotel, and on this counter is laid the Visitor’s Register, of which several fresh pages are filled daily with the names of new-comers. ”

“ Today it would be hard to find a hotel below Forty-second Street that still continues on what is known as the American plan. But when the Fifth Avenue was young that system of prices was supposed to embody the national spirit of democracy. ”

“ The environment of the Square is a pleasanter environment. When Delmonico's was at the Twenty-sixth Street corner, the hero of one of Brander Matthews's "Vignettes of Manhattan" pointed out of one of its windows and confessed that, failure in life as he was, he would die out of sight of the tower of the Madison Square Garden. A reminiscent sign or two is all that is left of the old Hotel Brunswick, which, among the hostelries of other days, yielded precedence only to the Fifth Avenue and the Brevoort as a factor in fiction. ”

“ While policemen were guarding the Fifth Avenue entrance he escaped through a rear alley, made his way to his yacht in the East River, and sailed to Spain. Today unsightly advertising signs, thorns in the flesh of the Fifth Avenue Association, disfigure the north-west corner of Forty-second Street. Behind the signs there is an office building. Until a few years ago the Bristol Hotel stood here, and back in the days before the Civil War there was a small tavern on the site, while on the adjoining lot was the garden of William H. Webb, the ship-builder. ”

“ For example there was an editorial on the subject, apropos of the Fifth Avenue, in the issue of October 1, 1859, soon after the hotel was opened, which ran, in part: "In the first place, what can be more preposterous than to establish a fixed rate of fare at hotels? Big, fat, bloated, blustering Guzzle goes to the Astor House for a week, and, in virtue of his standing and his paunch, gets a room near the dining saloon—a large, airy room looking on the Park, with lounge, arm-chairs, pier-glasses, Brussels carpet, and other furniture, all rich and luxurious ”

“ On the west side, between Bleecker and Amity streets, is the huge Grand Central Hotel, one of the most conspicuous objects on the street. Two blocks above, on the same side, is the New York Hotel, immediately opposite which are Lina Edwin’s and the Globe Theatres. On the east side of the street, and covering the entire block bounded by Broadway and Fourth avenue, and Ninth and Tenth streets, is an immense iron structure painted white. This is Stewart’s retail store. It is always filled with ladies engaged in “shopping,” and the streets around it are blocked with carriages. ”

“ This is, and is to be, a street of palaces and churches throughout its whole extent, always provided that the changeful current of Fashion do not set in some other direction too soon, carrying with it all the millionaires that are yet to arise within the century. In that event, the costly mansions of Fifth Avenue will inevitably become hotels and boarding-houses,—a reverse which so many grandly intended houses of elder New-York have already experienced. ”

“ It shows a handsome marble front on Broadway, with a brown stone extension on the same thoroughfare to Prince street, and extends back to Mercer street. It is handsomely furnished, and is kept on a scale of comfort and magnificence worthy of its fame. Its spacious halls and sitting-rooms, on the street floor, furnish one of the most popular lounging places in the city. Towards nightfall they are full to overflowing. The table is said, by the lovers of good living, to be the best served of any house in the city. The hotel is always full, and is very profitable to its proprietors. ”

“ The principal hotels are, beginning down town, the Astor, St. Nicholas, Metropolitan, Grand Central, Brevoort, New York, St. Denis, Spingler, Everett, Clarendon, Westminster, Glenham, Fifth Avenue, Hoffman, Albemarle, St. James, Coleman, Sturtevant, Gilsey, Grand, and St. Cloud. These are the largest, handsomest, and best kept houses in the city. Each has its characteristics and its special customers, and each in its way is worth studying.
The Astor House is one of the oldest hotels in the city. It is built of granite, and occupies an entire block on Broadway, from Vesey to Barclay streets. ”

“ It only means that the hotels are improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side, came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women should frequent that common entrance. ”

“ Nothing, however, is to exert a vaster influence on our style than the hotel. This 'institution,' as we have it, is comparatively unknown in Europe; beyond all nations are we a travelling and hotel-building people. Our hotels have not grown up with the scant traffic of the post chaise or diligence; they overleaped that feeble infancy, and started at once with the railroad and steamboat. Large, luxurious, and well appointed, they are usually the prominent buildings in all our large cities.
But as yet it is only their size and social importance that distinguishes them, not their architecture. ”

“ With the exception of the Washington street frontage and about 100 feet fronting on Avery street, which will be used for stores, the entire building will be devoted to the purposes of a first-class commercial hotel. On the first floor will be the office, reading-room, large public dining-room and buffet. In the basement, under the corner of Haymarket place and Avery street, there will be a rathskeller, entered both from the hotel and from the street, with the kitchens, serving-rooms, etc., in the rear, under the hotel lobby. ”

“ They demanded more pay and were allowed to work only eight hours per day. As a result of having skilled housekeepers, homes were rendered better and happier.
In 1999 America still remained the land of model hotels. In the 19th century the fame of Americans for maintaining the best [224] conducted and most palatial hostelries was already world-wide. Our city palace-hotels had no rivals in the world worthy of the name. In the twentieth century their enviable fame in this line continued to increase. Chicago and Manhattan still maintained their ancient rivalry in the hotel business. ”

“ It will not be seriously argued, I suppose, that the first twenty years of grand hotels have added as much ugliness to the world’s stock of ugliness as the first twenty years of railway stations. If there exists a grand hotel as direfully squalid as King’s Cross Station (palace of an undertaking with a capital of over sixty millions sterling) I should like to see it. Hotel architecture is the outcome of a new feature in the activity of society, and this fact must be taken into account. ”

“ Connors; it spun the fuzz of frizz rising off her blond coiffure into a sort of golden fog and picked out the sequins of her bodice.
The dinner-hour descends glitteringly upon West Forty-seventh Street, its solid rows of long, lanky hotels, actors' clubs, and sixty-cent tables d'hôte adding each its candle-power.
From her brace of windows in the Hotel Metropolis, the street was not unlike a gully cut through mica, a honking tributary flowing into the great sea of Broadway. A low, high-power car, shaped like an ellipse, cut through the snarl of traffic, bleating. ”

“ We were recommended to this American Hotel as the best and most comfortable in New York; and truly the charges were as high as one could have paid at the Clarendon, in the land of comfort and taxation. The wine was exorbitantly dear; champagne and claret about eleven shillings sterling a bottle; sherry, port, and madeira, from nine to thirteen. The rooms were a mixture of French finery and Irish disorder and dirt; the living was by no means good; the whole house being conducted on a close scraping system of inferior accommodations and extravagant charges. ”

“ Several immense hotels, among which may be mentioned the Plaza, at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, and the Majestic, at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West, are known as family hotels of the best type. The most luxurious restaurants in the city are Delmonico's, at Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, and Sherry's, almost opposite. In the business district the Café Savarin, in the Equitable Building, is well known.
Charities. The great number of immigrants landing at the port of New York, the poorest of whom remain in the city, tends to increase the dependent class. ”

“ The almost universal defect of the older class of hotels in London is, that they are too often private dwellings extemporized for purposes of public accommodation—not buildings erected with the distinct object for which they are used. Hence the London hotels, generally, are confined and awkward in their arrangements—a huddle of apartments on different levels, narrow passages, and the offensive odour of cookery being common. Rarely is there anything to parallel the larger hotels of New York, or the Hotel du Louvre at Paris. ”

“ Americans make fun of their own institutions; and their own journalism is full of such fanciful conjectures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to the tall story. The very word sky-scraper is an admirable example of an American lie. But I can testify quite as eagerly to the solid and sensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel. It is not only a pattern of vases and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate pattern of cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and humane custom to have a bathroom attached to every bedroom ”

“ THERE is a hotel on Broadway that has escaped discovery by the summer-resort promoters. It is deep and wide and cool. Its rooms are finished in dark oak of a low temperature. Home-made breezes and deep-green shrubbery give it the delights without the inconveniences of the Adirondacks. One can mount its broad staircases or glide dreamily upward in its aërial elevators, attended by guides in brass buttons, with a serene joy that Alpine climbers have never attained. ”

“ The individual hotel has developed into a complex institution, often of colossal size, supplying board and lodging on a most luxurious scale. In all parts of New York State, particularly in the smaller cities and towns, the small hotel with the inn tradition, with a simple table d’hôte service at one rate, still exists. But the tendency in New York City and in first and second class cities of the State has been toward a rapid expansion in the size of the individual establishment with an elaboration of service, and a specialization of hotel types. ”