Above the entrance to the W Hotel at 49th and Lexington are four elephant heads—each with a trunk that wraps around a metal flagpole.
Even though they’re grimy and their tusks could use some whitening, they make for a triumphant sight.
Here are more pachyderms in New York City.
The W Hotel went through a bunch of name changes: It used to be the Hotel Montclair, then the Hotel Belmont Plaza—Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin got their start in the Glass Hat club there—and finally the Doral Inn.
David Lamar was kind of a low-grade Bernie Madoff. He earned his nickname partly by taking millions of dollars from private citizens, promising to invest their cash in stocks and securities, and then keeping the money for himself.
Falsely claiming to be a scion of a wealthy Georgia family, Lamar lived large. He mingle with politicians and financial bigwigs, pretending to be a legit finance guy.
But for three decades he would be in trouble with the law, indicted for grand larceny, hiring detectives to commit murder, hiring Monk Eastman’s gang to beat a man up, and impersonating a politician over the phone.
He died penniless in 1934 in the Hotel Wellington in midtown. Three waiters who he had generously tipped during his days on Wall Street chipped in and paid for his funeral.
Today, a room at the 27-story Radisson Lexington Hotel, at 48th Street, would probably run you three or four hundred bucks a night at least.
But back in the 1930s, soon after this colossal structure was built, room rates were more like three or four bucks a night. That’s when it was known simply as the Hotel Lexington.
And look at the possible accommodations: two people, two twin beds, no higher than $8 a night!
See the hotel as it looks today here.
De Soto. Montcalm. Vespucci. La Salle. Marquette. The names of these men and others are inscribed above the second-floor windows of a building at 840 Eighth Avenue, a pretty typical early 20th century structure at 51st Street.
So who were these guys, and why are their names inscribed on the building?
They were Catholic explorers, missionaries, or war heros who helped settle and strengthen the New World. It makes sense that their names are here, considering that the building was put up in 1925 by the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization, as a hotel and clubhouse.
The Knights of Columbus didn’t have the building for long. It changed hands in 1933 and in the 1960s wound up as a YWCA. Today, it’s senior-citizen home . . . with some illustrious names giving it character.
If New York had to nominate one street as its most rock-bottom skid row ever, it would probably have to be the Bowery. Not the Bowery of 2009, of course, with its influx of luxe hotels and boutiques.
I’m thinking of the Bowery of 1909, where down-on-their-luck men stood on bread lines and passed time in 15-cent hotel rooms, as these Library of Congress photos show.
If a man found himself on the Bowery, that was pretty much it for him. He’d sunk as low as you could go, and things weren’t going to get better.
Theodore Dreiser understood this when he wrote Sister Carrie. It’s an underrated turn-of-the-century New York novel chronicling the rise of a young, ambitious actress (kind of a Carrie Bradshaw of the 1890s) juxtaposed with the fall of her older common-law husband.
Sister Carrie ends with the husband, the unemployed, weakened, and abandoned Hurstwood, committing suicide in a Bowery flophouse:
“Hurstwood laid down his fifteen cents and crept of with weary steps to his allotted room. It was a dingy affair—wooden, dusty, hard. A small gas-jet furnished sufficient light for so rueful a corner.
“‘Hm!’ He said, clearing his throat and locking the door.
“Now he began leisurely to take off his clothes, but stopped first with his coat, and tucked it along the crack under the door. His vest he arranged in the same place. His old wet, cracked hat he laid softly upon the table. Then he pulled off his shoes and laid down.
“It seemed as if he thought for a while, for now he arose and turned the gas out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few moments, in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applied no match. Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the odour reached his nostrils, he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed.
“‘What’s the use?’ he said, weakly, as he stretched himself to rest.”
The Standard. The Bowery. The Cooper Square. Even with the recession still taking its toll, these and other new luxury hotels continue to infiltrate the city.
So it’s reassuring to know that some of the best lowlife dives continue to thrive as well. (Plus, they have better signage.) Like what I’ve always dubbed the Pepsi-Cola Hotel, at Ninth Avenue and 42nd Street:
The Park Avenue Hotel is a nice one. Park Avenue and 125th Street, that is:
This photo was taken a while back, but I’m hoping the Leffert’s Hotel is still operating in Clinton Hill:
Looming over an empty lot on 46th Street is a two-fer: an ad for a a cheap hotel (hot & cold water!) superimposed over a cigar advertisement.
Vanishing New York and Fading Ad Blog spotted this one months back, but it’s in such a wonderful bit of old New York, it deserves more exposure.
Meanwhile, a pre-war apartment building near Carnegie Hall obscured by a post-war yellow residence of some kind features the kind of cigarette ad never seen anymore. This suave man smoking Barclays looks very 1980s.
The pleasure is back! Actually, do they even sell this brand anymore?
The Hotel Manger proclaims itself “the wonder hotel of New York—a modern marble palace” in this late 1920s postcard. And with amenities such as “circulating ice water,” it must have been quite a luxe place to hang your hat.
It was also a luxe place to commit suicide via jumping from one of its 20 stories.
A 1927 New York Times article chronicles one suicide: “When the woman came to the hotel she was assigned to Room 1239. About 10 o’clock guests on the second floor heard a thud, and the woman’s body was seen on the top of an extension that runs over the main entrance to the hotel.”
It wasn’t just a suicide magnet; The Manger also got in trouble with the feds for reportedly serving alcohol during Prohibition. A raid resulted in the arrest of several bellboys, waiters, and two bootleggers, as well as the padlocking of the building.
Perhaps that’s why the hotel was sold in 1931 and reopened as the Hotel Taft. The Taft catered to a Broadway tourist crowd, fell on hard times in the 1970s, and shut down in 1985. It’s now the Michelangelo.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it definitely wasn’t acceptable for single females to rent an apartment of their own. Which is why women’s residences sprang up all over Manhattan.
One was the Webster Apartments at 419 West 34th Street. The founders, Charles and Josiah Webster, were cousins of R.H. Macy; they left their fortune to the creation of a home for unmarried working women.
“The apartments are to operated without profit, meals at nominal prices are to be served, and a library and other conveniences are to be provided,” The New York Times wrote in 1916, when Charles Webster’s will was made public.
The residence opened in 1923. A room and two meals a day on a lower floor ran $8.50 a week; upper floor rooms plus meals went for $12 weekly. The Webster also provided sewing machines, an infirmary, a roof garden, and a library, with books “selected by a trained librarian,” the Times noted.
It all sounds quaint and unnecessary in today’s world. But The Webster is still going strong almost a century later, providing living quarters to hundreds of women at a time.
Other women’s residences are also still thriving. There’s the Jeanne d’Arc Home in Chelsea.
In the defunct female hotel category, check out the Barbizon and the Trowmart.
Quite a beauty on Broadway and 34th Street: When it opened in 1912, the Hotel McAlpin was the largest hotel in the world.
Besides its 1,500 rooms and a spot in then-fashionable Herald Square, the McAlpin had a basement restaurant called the Marine Grill—with multicolor terra cotta ornaments decorating columns and vaulted ceilings.
The Marine Grill also featured some pretty amazing murals that told the story of New York City’s maritime history. Sadly, in 1990, when the restaurant space was taken over by a Gap franchise (and the hotel became a rental building and eventually a co-op), those murals were headed for the trash bin.
But preservation groups stepped in and saved them, installing them in the Broadway-Nassau station in 2000.
Next time you’re downtown on the A train, take a few minutes to check ‘em out. Here’s one of the six salvaged murals.
The original iron entrance gate of the Marine Grill, also saved. Here, more photos and information on the murals.
