Illustration of Madison Square after a snowstorm, 1899. Courtesy New York Public Library
Missing a good old-fashioned New York City snowfall? Well, then, take in this unusual view from 1902:
What storm is this? The horrific blizzard that hit New York on February 17, 1902. It would be considered the worst snowstorm to hit the metropolitan area since the Great Blizzard of 1888. (Read all about it here.) I assume we’re actually in the aftermath of the blizzard here, as the snow shovels are out, and the kids are playing.
Who made this? Edison Manufacturing Company. Their Manhattan studio was nearby, at 41 East 21st Street.
Who’s the director? The head of Edison’s film division Edwin S. Porter, considered by most to be the first real movie director, inventing basic techniques used by subsequent filmmakers.
What are we seeing? Trolleys, cabs, carriages and other unusual vehicles, braving the icy conditions and dodging pedestrians at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. At one point, you almost see a team of horses slide off the road!
Below: An illustration from 1899, showing cabs parked along Madison Square (courtesy NYPL)
Why aren’t they showing the Flatiron Building? It’s not completed yet! The Daniel Burnham-designed office building would be opened by the summer, to great fanfare. But as an open construction site, it would have been dangerous to linger anywhere around it. I believe the slanted beams you see at the very end are part of the construction site.
This is the first film of a New York blizzard? This is probably the first film of any American blizzard. Primitive film technology had only recently allowed for outdoor filming. Porter and his crew would have been brave indeed dragging Edison’s equipment even two blocks through these conditions.
What’s that statue at the 1:15 mark? The seated, snow-covered figure of William Seward. The statue has sat at that corner since 1876. (More about that here.)
What’s that big building at the end? The Fifth Avenue Hotel, once considered the greatest accommodation in New York City and a headquarters for backroom politics in the 1870s and 1880s. Its glory days are long passed by the time of the blizzard. Six years later, it would be torn down and replaced with the building that stands at that corner today — the International Toy Center.
The double-breasted, cigar-chewing gentlemen who gathered in the sumptuous rooms of the Fifth Avenue Hotel were occasional connoisseurs of New York City history, and in particular, these amateur historians spoke of the very street corner where their hotel stood.
Before Madison Square, when the area was a barren parade ground, one Corporal Thompson opened a roadhouse and stagecoach station in the area that was to become 23rd Street and and Fifth Avenue.
Many spoke fondly of Thompson’s establishment, called Madison Cottage, because they remembered the place as young boys. They recalled the area’s rural quality, with carved rectangular blocks carved into the land and a dirt-road Broadway meandering north.
But that was the 1840s.
Madison Cottage, Hitchcock, Darling & Co.
Forty years later, Madison Square Park was the center of New York, a focal point of class, business and luxury that stretched south to Union Square, through that attractive collection of fine stores known as Ladies Mile, and up Fifth Avenue into the fabulous mansions of the rich.
And dead center of all that activity was the Fifth Avenue Hotel, not only the “finest [hotel] in this metropolis”, the “leading hotel of the world ,” but quite simply one of the most surprising stages for American politics of the mid and late 19th century.
New York’s Hotel Revolution
Hotels were fast becoming the center of New York life from at least the days of the Astor House, located near City Hall, in the 1830s. Within two decades, trendy new hotels (such as the St. Nicholas and the Metropolitan) spread up along Broadway and eventually clustered around Union Square.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel opened in 1859, the venture of wealthy merchant Amos Richards Eno, who accurately gambled that the center of city commerce would soon settle at 23rd Street. So confident a speculator was Eno that he moved from his brownstone at 74 Broadway (the first New Yorkbrownstone, he claimed) to a massive home nearby the hotel.
Some thought it unwise to build so far north, and when workers unearthed dozens of skeletons during construction — the area once being a potter’s field — the corner was even considered cursed. Eno defied the naysayers, pouring his wealth into the hotel to make it the most modern, most luxurious accommodation of the day.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel, 1879. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
A Gilded Age Confection
The Italian exterior was awash in five stories of imported marble, while austere, carpeted interiors of French design drew comparisons to European palaces.
Guests enjoyed reading rooms, a luxurious bar, a barber shop, a dedicated telegraph office, and a variety of dining and drawing rooms, not to mention the first passenger elevator ever built in the United States, a steam-powered monstrosity whisking passengers to their floor.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel reading room, busy every weekend. (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co.,)
Wheeling and Dealing
As the finest hotel in the city in the post Civil War years, it naturally became a magnet for politicians and financiers. Of all the ‘backrooms’ of American politics, none were as gleaming as the Fifth Avenue.
Bankers huddled in the legendary ‘parlor D. R.’ during the tense days of the financial panic of 1873. In particular, the hotel became a de facto headquarters for New York Republicans.
While often secondary to the city’s Democrats — this being the era of Tammany Hall‘s swelling power — Republicans were frequently in control of state government, and the Fifth Avenue Hotel became a smoky center of political wheeling and dealing.
During the 1870s, New York republicans became national power brokers and frequently hashed out crises here at the Fifth Avenue.
In the years before the Waldorf-Astoria, presidents and dignitaries all stayed here during visits. Seamier political maneuvers took place in the chambers of prominent politicians who held court here, including the inimitable Roscoe Conkling (at left), senator of New York and leader of the Republican faction known as the Stalwarts.
National Influence
When fractured Republicans at their convention in 1880 nominated non-Stalwart James Garfield for president, the nominee had to basically grovel for their support by symbolically ‘kissing the ring’ of the Stalwarts during a visit to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, partially agreeing to their system of patronage and taking Conkling ally Levi Morton as a member of his cabinet. (Garfield later backed out on this arrangement.)
Another frequent guest here was Chester A. Arthur, Garfield’s eventual vice president. When Arthur became president after Garfield’s assassination by Charles Guiteau (who had himself wandered the hotel’s hallways in delusion), he would set up his entire administration here during visits to his adopted city.
By the 1890s, a corridor of the hotel known as the ‘Amen Corner‘ was a famous congregation spot for Republican political bosses and reporters. As they frequently powwowed here on Sundays, gatherers would caustically shout ‘Amen!’ during heated discussions.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel in relation to the Flatiron Building
Checking Out
The hotel became a magnet for shenanigans of all varieties. In 1893, a couple hundred proponents of a U.S. monetary silver standard erupted into a riot that included two U.S. senators.
The bank robber Robert Montague was arrested here in 1896 thanks to a tip-off from a chambermaid. An early vestige of baseball’s National League met here annually, and the national pool competitions were held in the hotel’s billiard room.
By the new century, of course, the locus of New York activity was hastily moving uptown, and the Fifth Avenue Hotel was deemed a relic, even as a brand new structure across the street — the Flatiron Building — was being proclaimed the finest building in the city.
In 1908 the Fifth Avenue Hotel was torn down and replaced by the 16-story Toy Center (called the Fifth Avenue Building back in the day), the epicenter of toy manufacturing for much of the 20th century.
There are several enemies in Candice Millard‘s ‘Destiny of the Republic‘, the terrific narrative history of the assassination of President James Garfield during the summer of 1881. The most obvious foe is the delusional Charles Guiteau, who believed himself the nation’s savior when he shot President Garfield twice at a Washington DC train station on July 2, 1881. Then there were the microbial infections transmitted during improperly sanitized operations performed by Garfield’s doctor at the White House, causing blood poisoning that worsened the president’s suffering and ultimately killed him.
For the purposes on this blog, however, I was drawn into the tales of two New York politicians who became victims of rumor-mongering that summer. Powerful New York senator Roscoe Conkling was seen as a political rival of Garfield’s, a thorn in the president’s side, especially considering Conkling’s own political protege — his pawn, really — was Garfield’s vice president, Chester A. Arthur. Traumatic crises in this country are frequently accompanied by a churning undercurrent of suspicion and conspiracy, and Conkling and Arthur became victims of just such a shadowy accusation that summer.
Many believed Conkling to be culpable of the assassination attempt himself — perhaps not of pulling the trigger, but of fostering and encouraging the discord that inspired it. It’s not a stretch to consider Conkling an embodiment of the spoils system which determined hundreds of government jobs through political affiliation. Guiteau thought himself unfairly left out of that patronage system when he attacked Garfield that hot July day.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the luxury accommodation at 23rd Street off Madison Square that became Conkling’s second home and a regular scene of political intrigue for the Republican Party. Conkling endured the disintegration of his political career from his rooms here.
Meanwhile, many were mortified at the very thought of Arthur, hardly a universally admired figure, ascending to the presidency. While the president lay incapacitated in Washington, there was even debate as to when presidential responsibilities should cede to the vice president. Nobody seemed enthusiastic at the prospect of a President Chester A. Arthur.
Thus, Arthur essentially spent his summer hiding out in his townhouse at 123 Lexington Avenue(at right), fearful of seeming overly ambitious even as the fate of President Garfield seemed uncertain. On the day the president finally succumbed to his injuries, Arthur sobbed uncontrollably from his shuttered home as servants shooed away the press. Several hours later, he was sworn in as the 21st President of the United States on September 20, at 2:15 a.m, from the green-shuttered parlor of his home here.
‘Destiny of the Republic’ is a swift, thrilling read, certainly worthy of the praise it received when it was released last year, bringing in a cast of icons (including Alexander Graham Bell and Joseph Lister) to present a frightening world of medical uncertainty and strange madness.
