Fifth Avenue Hotel

Site and construction

The site that would become the Fifth Avenue Hotel was once the location of "Madison Cottage", a frame structure with an eighteenth-century core that had served as a stagecoach stop for passengers headed north from the city. From 1853 to 1856 it was replaced by 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 "Amusesments of the Ancient Greeks and Romans". It was this structure that was torn down to make way for the hotel.

The Fifth Avenue Hotel was built in 1856–59 by Amos Richards Eno at the cost of $2 million, was designed by Griffith Thomas with William Washburn. At the time of its construction it stood so far uptown from the centers of city life it was dubbed "Eno's Folly"; New York bankers refused to capitalize the project, and Eno turned to Boston for funding.

The hotel, which quickly developed a reputation as New York's most elegant, became "the social, cultural political hub of elite New York," and brought in a quarter of a million dollars a year in profits. It spurred development of additional hotels to the north and west, in the neighborhood known now as NoMad ("North of Madison Square Park").

Design and accommodations

The Fifth Avenue Hotel was of brick faced with white marble, of five storeys 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, 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.

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, rich carpets... the whole presenting about as handsome and as comfortless an appearance as any one need wish for." 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."

The hotel employed four hundred servants to serve its guests, offered private bathrooms – an unprecedented extravagance at the time – and ran advertisements featuring a fireplace in every room. It was an instant success, an indication that elite New Yorkers were rejecting the republican values of their forefathers, and had begun to value instead grandeur, luxury and comfort.

Notable events and uses

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.

President Ulysses S. Grant's campaign began at a dinner party in the hotel, and he and his cabinet once held an official session there. The celebrity lawyer Chester A. Arthur – who later became President of the United States – kept a suite for his office; 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. "It was a gathering place for fat cats like Boss Tweed, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk and Commodore Vanderbilt, who would trade stocks here after hours." The celebrated New York City physician, Dr. John Franklin Gray, lived at the hotel. When the superbly confident young Jim Fisk first arrived in New York, he stayed at the Fifth Avenue hotel until he was temporarily ruined. 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.

"Amen Corner"

The Fifth Avenue Hotel was known as a stronghold of the Republican Party. 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".

Demolition

The Fifth Avenue Hotel closed at midnight, 4 April 1908 and was demolished.

Its site was occupied in 1909 by the present office building, known as the Toy Center Building, designed by Robert Maynicke and Julius Franke, for Eno's grandson, Henry Lane Eno. Until 2007 it housed the International Toy Center, which was filled with wholesale buyers come the February Toy Fair and then again in October. The old hotel's resounding name was taken up by a Fifth Avenue Hotel at 24 Fifth Avenue, a grid of windows in a brick facade, by Emery Roth, since converted to apartments.