For the building called by this name in Omaha, Nebraska, see Ford Hospital.

Fifth Avenue Hotel

An 1860 depiction of the hotel.
Building
Address	200 Fifth Avenue
Owner	Amos R. Eno
Construction
Started	1856
Completed	1859
Inaugurated	23 August 1859
Demolished	1908
Architect	Griffith Thomas with William Washburn

The Fifth Avenue Hotel was a hotel located at 200 Fifth Avenue in New York City, New York. It formerly occupied the full Fifth Avenue frontage between 23rd Street and 24th Street, at the southwest corner of Madison Square in the borough of Manhattan.

[edit] History

The Fifth Avenue Hotel was built in 1856–59 for Amos Richards Eno, to designs of Griffith Thomas with William Washburn. It replaced the frame structure with an eighteenth-century core^[1] once called "Madison House" that had served as a stagecoach stop for passengers headed north from the city, but which had more recently been replaced by Franconi's tentlike Hippodrome.^[2]

"Madison Cottage" on the site of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, 1852

At the time of its construction it stood so far uptown from the centers of city life^[3] it was dubbed "Eno's Folly"; New York bankers refused to capitalize the project, and Eno turned to Boston for funding. It quickly developed a reputation as New York's most elegant hotel, brought in a quarter of a million dollars a year in profits,^[4] and spurred development of additional hotels to the north and west:^[5] the Fifth Avenue Hotel "became the social, cultural political hub of elite New York."^[4]

[edit] Design

Illustration of the Fifth Avenue Hotel dining room, Harper's Weekly (1859)

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,^[6] 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.^[7]

The hotel 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,^[8] rich carpets... the whole presenting about as handsome and as comfortless an appearance as any one need wish for."^[9] From the Hotel's instant success, it was not comfort New Yorkers were seeking, it was grandeur. Nevertheless, advertising featured a fireplace in every room.^[10]

[edit] Notable usage

Illustration of the Fifth Avenue Hotel reading room, Every Saturday (1871)

Abraham Lincoln was staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel when he went to make the address at Cooper Union that launched him towards the presidency. 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, also later president, kept a suite for his office;^[11] 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.^[12] "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."^[13] 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.^[14] 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 that stole the Presidential election of 1876.

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".^[15]

[edit] Demolition

The Fifth Avenue Hotel closed at midnight, 4 April 1908^[16] and was demolished.

Its site was occupied in 1909 by the present office building designed by Robert Maynicke and Julius Franke,^[17] until 2007 housing the International Toy Center,^[18] that was filled with wholesale buyers in the February Toy Fair^[19] and October. Its 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.^[20]

[edit] References and notes