The reinvention of a deluxe Times Square hotel

As Times Square’s fortunes rose and fell over the last century, so did the opulent hotels created to accommodate its visitors.

Take the Hotel Woodstock. Built in 1903 on West 43rd Street a half-block east of Times Square, this Beaux-Arts luxury hotel boasted of 400 rooms, plus restaurants and a ballroom.

It opened right in time to catch the area’s transformation into a theater district, nightlife hub, and of course, the crossroads of the world. Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell (below photo) were regulars.

By the early 1970s, it was carved up into a seedy SRO for low-income tenants.

“As late as about three years ago, the police would not venture into the lobby of the Woodstock Hotel on West 43rd Street in Manhattan without a backup team outside,” states a 1978 New York Times article.

“Prostitutes loitered in the hallways. Alcoholics and panhandlers gathered outside. Fires and break-ins were common.”

Thirty-plus years later, Times Square is a tourist mecca again, and the hotel, with a darker facade and unglamorous lobby, is across from the chic Conde Nast building.

But the Woodstock isn’t opening its doors to jet setters. It is now owned by Project FIND, a nonprofit that houses elderly New Yorkers.

Stay at the Hotel Arlington in Madison Square

According to this century-old postcard, $2 at the Hotel Arlington in genteel Madison Square gets you a room and a bath. Looking for a suite? That’ll run you at least $4.

Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and 25th Street hasn’t changed excessively since the early 1900s. Madison Square Park is just as pretty, but it’s no longer all that centrally located.

The Arlington Hotel building still stands and it’s still a hotel—a Comfort Inn. A low-rise holdout building that could be the one in the postcard (though remodeled) sits on its right.

The Gothic Revival church across the street remains. Built in 1868 by Richard Upjohn, it was once Trinity Chapel and is now home to a Serbian Orthodox congregation.

A Beaux-Arts facade on 31st Street has a secret

Once-fashionable 31st Street is a good place to hunt for hidden architectural gems. And number 19, just west of Fifth Avenue, is a striking example.

Look past the Herald Square Hotel sign, and its Beaux-Arts beauty comes to light: a limestone and red brick building with enormous arched front windows.

They frame a cherub holding a pen, surrounded by symbols of the arts: musical instruments, paintbrushes, and a pad. The words “wit” and “humor” appear on a banner.

So what’s it all about? The clue lies under the third-floor front windows. Beneath each window is the word “Life”—for the magazine that once was headquartered here.

When Life moved into the building, designed in 1895 by architects Carrere and Hastings (the same guys who designed the New York Public Library), it was a different publication from the 20th century version.

Life was a general-interest humor magazine, similar to rivals Puck and the New Yorker, and they published a fairly impressive group of literary and artistic talents, including Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl illustrations that debuted in the 1890s.

The cherub was sculpted by Philip Martiny. “Winged Life” is its name, and it symbolized a magazine that in the 1930s was turned into a photo weekly and then shut down in 2000.

The strange story of the recluse of Herald Square

If Ida Mayfield Wood were around today, she would be a candidate for Hoarders.

A Southern belle who hit the city in the 1850s, Ida ran in elite circles, marrying congressman and Daily News publisher Benjamin Wood, brother of Mayor Fernando Wood.

After her husband (below) died in 1900, Ida grew increasingly paranoid about money. She’d always been shrewd with cash, but the Panic of 1907, which caused a run on banks, pushed her to the edge.

So later that year, Ida, her daughter Emma, and Ida’s sister Mary all moved into a very modest two-room suite of a 34th Street (below in 1921) residence called the Herald Square Hotel.

From 1907 to the late 1920s, the three elderly women lived as recluses in squalor. They never left their suite; hotel staff fetched food (evaporated milk, coffee, crackers, bacon, eggs, and an occasional fish), as well as Cuban cigars, according to a New Yorker piece published in the 1950s.

By 1931, Emma and Mary had died. Ida, feeble and emaciated, was discovered living in her filthy suite, crammed with “an accumulation of old newspapers, cracker boxes, balls of used string, old wrapping paper, and several large trunks,” reported the New Yorker.

Oh, and more than a million dollars in cash and securities, plus $75,000 worth of jewelry—huge sums in that dark Depression year.

Her story made headlines in 1931 because a nephew applied for guardianship over her. By the time she died in 1932 at age 93, dozens of relatives had come out of the woodwork, hoping for an inheritance.

Then, as a judge tried to verify her descendants, he uncovered something incredible: Ida Mayfield Wood, who claimed to be a rich Southern belle, was really Ellen Walsh, the poor daughter of Irish immigrants from Massachusetts.

Not only was she a hoarder and recluse—she was a fraud who’d gone to elaborate lengths to invent her identity, her husband and social circle in the dark.

Ending it all at a popular midtown tourist hotel

Today, it’s the luxe Michelangelo Hotel. But from 1926 through the 1980s, it was the 2,000-room Hotel Taft, “one of the premier tourist hotels in the city,” a New York Times article recalls.

Over the years, that adds up to a lot of out-of-towners booking rooms to celebrate events and catch Broadway shows. But like any multistory hotel, the Taft has also had its share of suicides.

“Woman Phones News of Her Own Suicide,” a headline from June 1933 reads. After calling the city desk at the Daily Mirror, 35-year-old phone operator Miss Catherine Mary Dietz told a staffer that she’d just taken “36 tablets of poison” and was about to leap to her death from her room on the 18th floor, which she did, a moment later.

That wasn’t the only suicide at the Taft in 1933. In February, 40-year-old artist Charles Schomburg jumped from his 14th-floor room, leaving a note that read “financial reverses have brought me to this point of despondency.” His body hit the roof of the adjoining Roxy Theater.

Seven years later, a Brooklyn surgeon registered under a fake name and overdosed. “The body was found in bed clad in pajamas with the covers pulled it,” the Times wrote.

“In a wastepaper basket near by was a brown bottle containing a few crystals.” He left his home phone number on a pad on the night table.

A TV and theater actor also ended his life at the Taft. Philip Loeb (he played the father on The Goldbergs) OD’d there on sleeping pills in 1955. His apparent motive: The show dropped him because he’d been blacklisted as a communist.

What Columbus Circle looked like in the 1920s

The traffic around the circle seems chaotic, and the fountains that surround it now wouldn’t come for another 80 or so years.

The yellow Victorian-looking structure in the center is the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel, torn down and replaced by the much-maligned Lollipop Building. Redone in the 2000s, it now houses the Museum of Arts and Design.

I can’t figure out what the billboard on top of the white building says. United States something? Columbus Circle had big, bright billboards and signage for decades.

The 1940s tourist attractions of the “Penn Zone”

If you think the streets around Penn Station are crowded with out-of-towners now, imagine how jammed they must have been in the 1940s.

Back then, this was the “Penn Zone,” according to this vintage postcard, a stretch of Midtown brimming with massive hotels and must-see sites for tourists.

Some are still here, of course, such as the Empire State Building and Macy’s (number 8). But the original Penn Station (2) bit the dust in 1963, and the Hotel McAlpin (4) is now called Herald Towers and is a rental apartment building.

Gimbel’s (10) and Sak’s 34th Street (9) are ghosts. The Hotel New Yorker (6) keeps packing them in, while the Hotel Martinique (3) endured a tortured history as a 1980s welfare hotel before reopening as a Radisson.

A 1790s Village backhouse you’ll never see again

Until 2008, 13th Street just off of Sixth Avenue was the site of a hidden gem: a Federal style backhouse reportedly dating to the 1790s.

The two-story house wasn’t visible from the street but was located behind a low-rise building housing two restaurants at 52 and 54 West 13th Street.

Then a hotel developer came and bought the low-rise building. It met the wrecking ball, and for a little while in 2009, the backhouse could be seen through a construction fence. Here’s a closeup view.

Not long after, unfortunately, the 16-story hotel slowly rose in front of it, entombing the backhouse out of sight forever.

If it’s still standing, that is. I have no idea if the hotel developer turned it into a pile of bricks, seeing no use or value in the squat, rundown building.

Or maybe the backhouse remains there, blocked off out of view of passersby, and only future guests of what will be called the Gem Hotel Union Square (above) will ever be able to see it again.

What’s on the menu at the Brighton Beach Hotel?

At the turn of the last century, the sprawling Brighton Beach Hotel served as a more upscale seaside resort than its neighbor, Coney Island.

And if you were wrapping up your summer vacation there in 1906, you’d probably make dinner plans at the hotel restaurant.

So what kind of food and drink would be available to you?

We’re talking about a mind-boggling array of seafood (clear green turtle soup! fried eels!), poultry, caviar, steak, chops, pastries, and ice cream, not to mention a pretty big wine and drink list.

The entire hotel restaurant menu from that year (the front cover is at left) has been preserved as part of the New York Public Library’s menu collection.

It’s a fantastic reference that gives us a peek at the city’s culinary preferences over the years.

The massive menu selection can be viewed here. But for just the seafood, check out this excerpt from it above. I wonder what exactly was in clam chowder Brighton?

A 1906 postcard of the lovely and genteel Brighton Beach Hotel, once at the foot of Coney Island Avenue. Thanks to Kevin P. for suggesting this menu.

What if the city really did rename the Bowery?

The first attempt to change the name of the city’s oldest thoroughfare appears to have been in 1895.

A New York Times article reported a rumor that the Bowery, an English corruption of the Dutch term for farm, bouwerie, would soon be known as Parkhurst Avenue.

It had to be a joke. Parkhurst was Charles Parkhurst, a social reformer who battled the Tammany-backed gangs and saloons that made up the tacky, crime-ridden Bowery in the late 19th century.

The next try at a less low-rent moniker, according to a Times piece from 1897, was Piccadilly. Why Piccadilly? It was never explained—but the proposal didn’t gain any ground.

Another stab at a new name to shed the Bowery stigma happened in 1916. Business owners who wanted a “fresh start” suggested Central Broadway and Cooper Avenue. Dignified, yes, but very dull.

Again, the suggestions went no where. After that, Bowery merchants and residents seem to have thrown in the towel and accepted that their street would always be the city’s skid row.

[Photo: Bowery in 1910, NYPL Digital Collection]