It’s just after the turn of the century in this enchanting postcard of the Fifth Avenue side of Madison Square Park.
The Flatiron Building is there, so it must be at least 1902. But carriages and drivers still line the street opposite the park, likely waiting for the city’s wealthy and powerful to emerge from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, demolished in 1908.
The postcard itself is postmarked 1910, and the writer has scribbled, “I am loving New York and having a great time.”
When the white marble Fifth Avenue Hotel was set to open in 1859, it was mocked as “Eno’s Folly,” after the developer who built it.
With the city’s hotel district farther south on Broadway, why would anyone pay to stay on the outskirts of the city’s center, as Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street was at the time?
But after its grand opening, the Fifth Avenue Hotel became the city’s premier luxury residence and made Madison Square the focal point of post–Civil War New York.
Among the amenities: rooms with private baths and fireplaces and the first “vertical railway”—aka, elevator—ever installed in a hotel.
Presidents and kings stayed there, attended to by a staff of 400. The city’s richest men, like Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, congregated in the drawing rooms. Local politicians held court.
In 1908 it was demolished; its demise serves as a bookend of the Gilded Age. Today the building occupying this spot houses the Italian dining emporium Eataly.
[Bottom image: the hotel’s reading room, a decidedly all-male place. NYPL]
I like Flat Iron as two words; it doesn’t obscure the origin of the building’s name.
Aside from the streetcars navigating Broadway, the best part of the postcard is the caption on the back: “Facing Madison Square, these two buildings are among the most interesting in the uptown district.”
Uptown for 1905, I guess.
In the center is the still-standing, seven-story Western Union Building, by late 19th century starchitect Henry Hardenburgh.
And look—no Shake Shack!
Ephemeral New York 