The site that would become the Fifth Avenue Hotel was once the location of Madison Cottage, a frame structure with an eighteenth-century core that had served as a stagecoach stop for passengers headed north from the city. From 1853 to 1856 it was replaced by Franconi's Hippodrome, a tent-like structure of canvas and wood which could accommodate up to 10,000 spectators who watched chariot races and other "Amusesments of the Ancient Greeks and Romans". This structure was torn down to make way for the hotel. The Fifth Avenue Hotel was built in 1856-59 by Amos Richards Eno at the cost of $2 million; the building was designed by Griffith Thomas with William Washburn. At the time of its construction it stood so far uptown from the centers of city life it was dubbed "Eno's Folly"; New York bankers refused to capitalize the project, and Eno turned to Boston for funding. The hotel, which quickly developed a reputation as New York's most elegant, became "the social, cultural political hub of elite New York," and brought in a quarter of a million dollars a year in profits. It spurred development of additional hotels to the north and west, in the neighborhood known in the early 21st century as NoMad.
Design and accommodations
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was constructed of brick and white marble, and stood at five storeys over a commercial ground floor. The first example of Otis Tufts' "vertical screw railway," the first passenger elevator installed in a hotel in the United States, a notable but cumbersome feature powered by a stationary steam engine carried passengers to the upper floors by a revolving screw that passed through the center of the passenger cab. The building was of a plain Italianate palazzo-front design, with a projecting tin cornice, but its sober exterior contained richly appointed public rooms: Harper's Weekly reviewed its "heavy masses of gilt wood, rich crimson or green curtains, extremely handsome rose-wood and brocatelle suits, rich carpets... the whole presenting about as handsome and as comfortless an appearance as any one need wish for." A correspondent for The Times of London, in New York to cover the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1860, called the hotel "a larger and more handsome building than Buckingham Palace." The hotel employed 400 servants to serve its guests, offered private bathrooms and ran advertisements featuring a fireplace in every room. It was an instant success—an indication that elite New Yorkers were rejecting the republican values of their forefathers, and had begun to value grandeur, luxury and comfort instead.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was known as a stronghold of the Republican Party. From a corner nook in one of the public rooms, which he dubbed his "Amen Corner", Republican political boss Thomas Collier Platt controlled patronage in New York City and State for a few years in the 1890s; here he held his "Sunday School", where projects did not go forward until they had his "amen".
Closing and demolition
The Fifth Avenue Hotel closed at midnight, 4 April 1908 and was demolished. It was reported that patrons of the hotel's bar spent $7,000 in drinks during its last day of operation. Its site was occupied in 1909 by an office building known as the Fifth Avenue Building, designed by Robert Maynicke and Julius Franke, for Eno's grandson, Henry Lane Eno. Until 2007 it housed the International Toy Center, which was filled with wholesale buyers come the February Toy Fair and then again in October. The old hotel's name was taken up by a Fifth Avenue Hotel at 24 Fifth Avenue, a grid of windows in a brick facade, by Emery Roth, later converted to apartments. A plaque on the Toy Center, the building currently on the site, commemorates the hotel.
