Past New York: The Grand Manhattan Hotel

These five photographs gather the world of the Grand Manhattan Hotel just before its displacement by the skyscraper. The earliest views belong to the 1870s, when fashionable hotels clustered around Madison Square and Union Square; the latest records the Waldorf in 1893, already oriented toward a northward future. Across the group, scale enlarges, ornament accumulates, and the hotel begins to assume the aspect of an urban institution rather than an enlarged house. None of the buildings survive. 

This collection includes:

Unidentified photographer. Hotel Brunswick, Fifth Avenue and 26th-27th Streets, c. 1876. 

Unidentified photographer. Hotel Brunswick, Fifth Avenue and 26th-27th Streets, c. 1876. 

Two prints from the same negative. The larger impression is inscribed “Windsor Hotel” on the verso, though the address given, Fifth Avenue between 26th and 27th Streets, identifies the Brunswick (the Windsor stood at 46th-47th Streets. The smaller mounted print is captioned “Hotel Brunswick” within the image, securing the attribution. Henry Hobson Richardson remodeled a row of brownstones into the hotel in 1870-71, one of his earliest New York commissions. The resulting façade retains its domestic cadence even as it consolidates into a single enterprise. Popular with English visitors and serving as headquarters of the New York Coaching Club, the Brunswick occupied a transitional position between private house and commercial hostelry. It closed in 1896 and was demolished in 1906, replaced by the Brunswick Building (Kimball & Donnell, 1907), later the Grand Madison. 

Unidentified photographer. Westminster Hotel, Irving Place and 16th Street, c. 1870s. 

The Westminster Hotel, an Italianate structure at Irving Place and 16th Street, cultivated an air of cultivated seclusion just east of Union Square. Its scale remains resolutely domestic: a continuous façade, regular fenestration, restrained ornament. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain both lodged here, drawn to its quieter register within an increasingly commercial district. In the late 1870s, a group of regulars meeting at the hotel bar organized a kennel club devoted to purebred dogs; lacking consensus on a name, they adopted that of the establishment itself. The Westminster Kennel Club, and its annual dog show (first held in 1877), persist; the building did not, having been demolished in 1909. 

 Unidentified photographer. Hotel Victoria, Broadway, Fifth Ave, and 27th Street, c. 1870s-1880s. 

Photographed from an elevated vantage, this massive eight-story Second Empire pile with a three-story mansard roof, iron cresting, and dormers was designed by Richard Morris Hunt and completed in 1872. It occupied the entire block from Broadway to Fifth Avenue along 27th Street. Originally called the Stevens House, it contained just eighteen apartments, each the equivalent of a private home with its own dining room, kitchen, parlor, and servants’ quarters. President Grover Cleveland used the Victoria as his New York headquarters. The building was razed in 1914.  

John S. Johnston. Hotel Waldorf and Fifth Avenue, N.Y., 1893. 

Johnston photographed the Waldorf in its first year, the hotel having opened in March 1893. Designed by Henry Hardenbergh for William Waldorf Astor, it rose on the site of the Astor family mansion at Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street, its German Renaissance façade bristling with gables, turrets, and a distinctive corner tower. A corset shop occupies the ground floor of the neighboring building at left. The Astoria Hotel, built by Astor’s cousin John Jacob Astor IV, would open next door in 1897, and the two were connected and operated together as the Waldorf-Astoria. Both were demolished in 1929, and the Empire State Building was erected on the site, opening in 1931. The current Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue opened the same year. 

A full description and inventory are available on request.

$5,500