The 1930 George Washington (Freehand) Hotel - 23 Lexington Avenue

 

Born in 1878, Harry Barth joined his father's restaurant and hotel supply firm, I. Barth & Son, around the turn of the last century.  It grew to be the largest hotel and restaurant supply business in the East.  Barth sold his interest in the company in 1925, accepting the caveat that he could not involve himself in the business for a decade.  And so, instead, he focused on acquiring and erecting hotels, forming the Barth Hotels Corporation and the affiliated Club Hotel Corporation.

On March 18, 1929, The New York Times reported that Barth's two corporations planned the erection of a $3 million hotel on the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street.  "The George Washington Hotel, of which Frank M. Andrews is the architect, will be a sixteen-story structure, containing 630 rooms, each with private bath, and stores on the ground floor."  In fact, Frank M. Andrews would work with John B. Peterkin on the design, and both would be listed as "associated architect."  

By now Barth operated a chain of hotels, filled with carefree tourists and businessmen who spent freely.  But had he been able to see seven months into the future, he assuredly would have halted the plans for another.  During construction, on October 29, the Stock Market crashed, plunging the nation into the Great Depression.  Years later, The New York Times would recall, "Construction on the last unit of the group, the George Washington Hotel at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street, was begun just before the depression, which put an end to this venture."  The costs of the hotel, completed in 1930, forced Barth and his corporations into bankruptcy.

Despite the pall of the Depression, Andrews and Peterkin had designed the brick-faced structure in a 1920's take on Renaissance period architecture.  The three-story stone base was distinguished by elaborate, polychrome terra cotta framed windows set into shallow arched recesses.  The impressive, double-height stone entranceway drew inspiration from a triumphal arch, its free-standing Doric columns and layered pilasters upheld an arched opening and entablature.

Architecture and Building magazine noted in its February 1930 issue that the hotel "is designed to cater exclusively to single young men and women in New York City who seek attractive accommodations at very moderate rates."  To garner extra income, the ground floor contained shops while the entire second floor was devoted to "an interesting series of public rooms," some of which could be rented for meetings and other assemblies.  The article said "As this hotel is for permanent residents rather than transients, the atmosphere of these rooms in intimate."

For the residents, there was a "gallery" in the Italian Renaissance style.  A library was finished with Georgian wooden paneling and held a copy of a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.  "It is comfortably furnished with numerous arm chairs and reading lamps," said Architecture and Building, adding, "The lounge follows the Colonial period in a finish of knotty pine."

photo by Wurts Bros., from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

The upper floor rooms were relatively small, with just a single bed, night table, small desk, and an easy chair.  But each had a bathroom, closet and a telephone.  On the roof was a "sun parlor," enclosed in French windows, and a roof garden.

A major tenant was the City College Club, which had a hand in the designs for its space.  Its private entrance was on East 24th Street, although the clubrooms had access to other parts of the hotel.  On December 29, 1929, The New York Times explained, "The main club consists of an entrance foyer off which are grouped the club rooms and the vestiaire [i.e. coat room], telephones, men's rooms and service pantries."  

The main room was 50 feet long and 30 feet wide, "and so planned as to serve as a general lounge and club room at all times.  It can be easily transformed into a meeting hall or dining hall wherein may be given dances, general receptions, &c."  The room had been designed in a Dutch Colonial motif, using models and documents in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for guidance.  The tiled fireplace, with the insignia of the College of the City of New York, was fabricated in Holland.  There were also a 25-by-30-foot billiard and bridge room, a library and a card room.  

The opening of the George Washington Hotel not only coincided with the Great Depression, but with the rise of Nazism in Germany.  In the July 1932 German elections, the Nazi Party became the most powerful political group in Germany.  Its influence spread quickly to America.

On August 28, 1933, The Daily Worker, a Socialist newspaper, reported on the Kulturbund, or Culture Union, "an aristocratic Nazi organization in which the 'gentlemen' Nazis segregate themselves from the riff-raff and small fry, who have their Storm Troop, and carry out the rowdy work."  The article said, "They have elegant headquarters in the George Washington Hotel, on Lexington Ave. at 23rd St., and all the leading Nazis live there in style, supported in part by the 75-cent weekly dues of the rank and file."

"The president of the 'Kulturbund' is George Schellenberg, adventurer and ex-movie actor," said the article, "who lives at the George Washington Hotel and has a big job in a department store, where he is notorious for his vicious manner of treating the workers under him."  The Daily Worker claimed that Schellenberg, after spending his inheritance in Germany, "came to America to make his fortune, but made a miserable failure of it until with Hitler's accession to power he got his chance to try for a bloody Nazi career."

The House Immigration and Naturalization Sub-Committee put Clarence A. Hathaway, an editor of The Daily Worker, on the stand on November 15, 1933 as part of their investigation "to probe Nazi propaganda activity in the United States."  The committee members and Americans at large were shocked, "when Hathaway not only revealed the presence of super-patriotic Mr. [Hamilton] Fish at a recent Nazi meeting at the George Washington Hotel of New York City, but also when he offered 'to produce documents showing that Hamilton Fish is engaged in Nazi activities in the United States.'"  The testimony, expectedly, drew strong denial from Fish.

Ironically, the hotel that had been a hive of Nazi activity became a refuge for German Jewish children eight years later.  In 1941 the German-Jewish Children's Aid Organization brought 1,000 refugee youths to America.  According to Lori Gemeiner Bihler in her 2018 book Cities of Refuge, "Some of these thousand children stayed at the George Washington Hotel on Lexington Avenue.  In a period of a few days, they received medical attention and an opportunity to find their 'land legs' with the other children.  They were then placed either with relatives, Jewish foster families, or in temporary housing."

On January 26, 1939, English-born novelist Christopher Isherwood and British poet W. H. Auden took rooms here.  Although they occasionally had sex, according to the 2013 book W. H. Auden in Context, edited by Tony Sharpe, they were not romantically entangled.  On January 29 Auden wrote his mother, saying, "We have found a nice hotel--the George Washington--23rd St. and Lexington Ave."

Isherwood soon moved on (to southern Calif0rnia), but Auden, who very much liked the hotel, remained.  Upon hearing that British composer Benjamin Britten was planning a visit to American in June 1939, Auden wrote and recommended the George Washington Hotel.   "It's much the nicest hotel in town and the manager Mr. Donald Neville-Willing (and don't forget the hyphen) is expecting you.  There is a good piano."

Indeed, W. H. Auden formed a friendly relationship with Donald Neville-Willing, and upon his leaving, presented the manager with a thank-you in the form of a poem hand-written on five sheets of hotel stationery.  It began:

O, is there a technique to praise the Hotel George Washington then,

That doesn't resemble the ways the 

Really professional men

Convince a two hundred pound matron

She's the feather she was in her youth?

Well, considering who is the patron,

I think I shall stick to the truth.

It stands on the Isle of Manhattan

Not far from the Lexington line,

And although it's demode to fatten,

There's a ballroom where parties may dine.

As mid-century approached, Dr. Philip Newton and his second wife, lived here.  His extraordinary life started in Fort McIntosh in Laredo, Texas, where his father, Major John Newton, was serving.  In 1914 he went to Europe to serve with the Red Cross during World War I, and was made surgeon in the American Ambulance Unit of the Grand Duchess Tatiana, daughter of Czar Nicholas.  He was made a general in the Russian Imperial Army, and in 1915 married Russian Princess Helene Schahofskaya.

During World War II Newton operated a pharmacological laboratory that made vitamin-infused candies for British children.  He died in his room in the George Washington Hotel on June 17, 1950.

By the 1970's the hotel had grown seedy.  Lenny Sullivan, a 27-year-old who lived on East 27th Street, rented a room long enough to have an afternoon fling with a "woman friend" on July 29, 1973.  As he stepped out of the shower, he touched the air conditioner which, according to The New York Times, "was wired improperly and not grounded."  He was fatally electrocuted and his companion received an electric shock when she attempted to pull his body away.

A self-described artist, Tony Shafrazi paid $15 each week for his room here in 1974.  On February 28 that year he entered the Museum of Modern Art and, in front of a crowd of patrons, took a can of red spray paint from his coat and sprayed "Kill Lies All" on Picasso's painting Guernica.  As a guard grabbed him, Shafrazi demanded, "Call the curator, I'm an artist."  At the 54th Street station house, he explained his vandalism saying, "I'm an artist and I wanted to tell the truth."  Thankfully, the masterpiece was fully conserved.

A tragic resident was former actor Al Hodge. He started his career as a radio actor, once playing the Green Hornet.  But he rose to fame with the advent of television.  In 1948 he was hired as the title character of the series Captain Video.  He became a hero to children across the country until the show was dropped in 1956.  Unfortunately for Hodge, he had become so identified with Captain Video, that he could no longer find work.  He turned to alcohol, went through a series of marriages, and finally ended up at the George Washington Hotel, living off Social Security checks.

On March 22, 1979, Judith Cummings of The New York Times wrote, "But, with the Green Hornet and Captain Video long behind, him, Mr. Hodge was found dead and alone Monday in a midtown hotel, his realm reduced to the dimensions of a single room."  He was 66 years old.

An unlikely tenant at the time was Brigid Berlin, the daughter of Hearst publishing mogul Richard E. Berlin and his socialite wife Muriel, known as Honey.  Brigid had rebelled against her upbringing.  The New York Times's John Leland said, "She took mountains of speed and made thousands of recordings and Polaroid photographs of New York's bohemian demimonde, when such a thing existed."  Berlin was a mainstay of the Andy Warhol set and appeared in his movies Bad and Chelsea Girls.  

In 1991 musicians Dee Dee Ramone, founder of the bank the Ramones, and Richard Barone had rooms here.  Ramone mentions the hotel in his book, Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones; and in his book, Frontman, Surviving the Rock Star Myth, Barone writes:

...we moved downtown to the rather shabby George Washington Hotel on Lexington and 23rd.  An SRO--single room occupancy or standing room only--either phrase applied.  Our rooms had barely enough floor space for one to stand and answer the nonexistent phone.  I saw my first junkie collapse and remain in front of the elevator in the lobby as people walked past.  Rumor had it that movie queen Veronica Lake, one of the stars in my mother's scrapbook, had sadly spent her last days working as a counter waitress in the drab coffee shop downstairs.  This was not exactly the Plaza.

On July 2, 1995, The New York Times reported that The Educational Housing corporation, a provider of student housing, had signed a 15-year lease on the hotel.  "The corporation will check each room twice a year, and repaint it if existing lead paint has peeled or chipped."  Three years later the newspaper announced that 600 beds here had been leased to the School of Visual Arts for student housing.  

Change came in 2018 when the investment firm AllianceBernstein remodeled the George Washington Hotel to the Freehand New York hotel.  Design studio Roman and Williams transformed the interiors to attract a hip "artist community," according to the owners' marketing.  Amazingly, the Gilbert Stuart George Washington painting was still in place, albeit a bit dingy.  Roman and Williams had it professionally conserved and rehung it in what is now the George Washington bar.

photographs by the author

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The 1912 McAlpin Hotel - Broadway and 34th Street

The 6th Avenue Elevated Train runs by the newly-completed McAlpin Hotel -- photo NYPL Collection

On Saturday July 1, 1911 the American Telephone Journal, Telephony, reported a most startling event. Frank M. Andrews, president of the McAlpin Hotel which was rising at Broadway and 34th Street, had just signed the largest telephone contract ever written. At a time when in-room telephones were essentially unheard of, the McAlpin would have 1800 phones.

“The McAlpin Hotel will be the best telephoned building in the world,” said the article, “having more telephones than many of the towns surrounding New York.”

In addition to the 1800 guest phones, there would by 17 pay phone booths, three switchboards. “As will be observed,” said Telephony, “the McAlpin is to be modern in every way.”

And modern it would be.

The hotel was the brainchild of Frank Mills Andrews who envisioned not merely the largest hotel in the world, but the most innovative. Mills not only pulled together the investors, he founded and was president of the Greeley Square Hotel Company to operate the hotel.  And he designed it.

Among Andrews’ innovations was a fully-equipped miniature hospital “where cases, no matter how serious can be treated with exactly the same care as in the best up-to-date private sanatorium,” according to the Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association in January 1911. Situated on the 23rd floor so that the patients could enjoy quiet, it was outfitted with “every modern appliance known to surgery.” The surgeons and doctors who would staff the hospital were interviewed personally by Andrews.

Years later, in 1920, a Norwegian guest wrote to nurse Elizabeth P. Harmey saying “The most enjoyable part of my visit to America was the time I was sick in your care at the McAlpin.”

A Turkish bath and swimming “plunge” were planned for the 24th floor – unusual in that most such baths were located in basements with no circulation of fresh air.  One floor was reserved for single women traveling alone. To prevent their being harassed, there was a separate check in desk on that floor, staffed by women, so the delicate traveler could circumvent the main lobby.  All employees working on that floor were female.

And, to be fair, the 22nd floor was designated for male guests only.  Included on that floor was a clubroom with card tables and a bar.

The New York Times reported that, “Perhaps the last word in specialization is the sixteenth floor, known already as the ‘Sleepy Sixteenth.’” Reserved for guests who had night jobs or for some other reason slept during the day, “the silence of night will be preserved…It is far above the noise and swirl of one of the busiest crossways in the world.”

Andrews promised that his hotel would “be a monument which will surpass in beauty any other hotel in the world; combined with this there are to be comforts of the most practical and necessary character for both the traveler and the resident.”

He continued to think outside of the box by designing retail spaces opening on to the sidewalk – a startling and financially-advantageous novel idea.

A drugstore and candy shop were incorporated into the street level -- photo NYPL Collection

The land on which the hotel rose was owned by the McAlpin Estate, hence the name, and the stockholders included esteemed names like Charles P. Taft, brother of the President of the United States, and General T. Coleman du Pont.

Andrews created an imposing 25-story structure that dominated the neighborhood at the time. Sitting on a four-story base of “Bedford stone,” it rose as three side-by-side wings of buff-colored brick. The top-most floors were embellished with colorful, eye-catching terra cotta.

Costing $13.5 million – or approximately $308 million today – it was reportedly the largest hotel in the world. With a staff of 1,500 it could accommodate 2,500 guests. The hotel was completed just prior to New Year’s Eve, opening on December 30, 1912.  Intending to provide “first-class accommodations at moderate prices,” according to Good Lighting and the Illuminating Engineer magazine, the room rates ranged from $1.50 to $5.00 per night.

Inside, the architect did not disappoint.

The Italian Renaissance-style lobby, the largest in the city, rose three stories and was executed in marble and Caen stone. Arched openings were supported by Breche violet marble columns and the spaces between the arches were decorated with mural paintings by T. Gilbert White who had decorated the New Haven courthouse and the Kentucky Statehouse.. The paintings represented jewels, depicted as female figures, each dressed in the color of the gem she portrayed.

Also on the first floor were the ladies’ reception room and the men’s bar and café (designed in 15th Century Italian Gothic with walnut paneling and a vaulted ceiling).

Looking down onto the main lobby was the second floor Tapestry Gallery. Here 26 tapestries from the Herter Looms were hung, depicting the military history of New York.  Art critic Helen Henderson called them “important as examples of American tapestry.” Before being hung at the McAlpin, they were exhibited throughout the United States.

The second floor contained more public rooms: the men’s writing and lounging room, a café, the main dining room with its crystal chandeliers, and the banquet room with its vaulted and groined ceiling. On the 25th floor were the ballroom and roof gardens.

Hidden away was the charming Chinese tearoom. The Steward magazine noted “the McAlpin Hotel teashop is serving a special Chinese luncheon and supper…and is proving very successful.”

That success, the magazine said, was due to the hotel’s hiring of “a number of dainty little American-born Chinese girls to serve as waitresses” as well as Chinese cooks. Until now, Chinese restaurants were considered decidedly middle-class; hotel restaurants traditionally served French cuisine. The little Chinese café was yet one more example of the hotel’s bold initiatives.

More impressive than the opulent Louis XVI-style dining room was the unusual Rathskeller located below ground in the first of three basements. Good Lighting and the Illuminating Engineer wrote “The rathskeller will be of exceptional interest to the public because of its color scheme and design. In floor area, it is said to be approximately double the size of any similar room in New York City and is designed with a series of columns supporting low-groined vaulting, the whole being constructed of polychrome terra cotta decorated in the feeling of the Spanish Renaissance.”

The ornate terra cotta clad "Rathskeller" had become "The Grill Room" by the time this postcard was produced.  The tile murals can be seen in the background. -- author's collection

Like so many other details in the McAlpin, terra cotta rose here to a new level. The Atlantic Terra Cotta Company used “ a new method of blending colors by running the glazes on the terra cotta, and the skillful handling of the juxtaposition of color,, results in a charming and novel effect quite new to the use of this material,” the article said.

Terra cotta murals by artist Frederick Dana Marsh decorated the walls, depicting the maritime history of the city – responsible for the room’s renaming as The Maritime Grill. The space was sumptuous in color and design and created an other-worldly, fantasy setting.

Two years after opening, the hotel owners enlarged. The two 25-foot wide lots at 46 and 48 West 34th Street were purchased and a seamless addition was constructed adding 200 more rooms and another ballroom.

In 1922 the McAlpin became one of the first hotels to connect ship-to-shore radios into their telephone system so guests could speak directly to voyaging friends or relatives. Three years later a circular, glass-enclosed radio studio was installed and station WMCA was born from which, among other programs, the McAlpin Orchestra performed. “Only professional entertainers will broadcast, as it has been decided not to extend the use of the microphone to amateurs,” vowed the management.

The hotel earned unwanted publicity when, on December 23, 1933, Cuban Congressman Armando Infante was beaten by two assailants in his room.

Jamlee Hotels purchased the building in 1938 for $5.4 million, spending another $1.75 million in renovations. In 1952 Jamlee president Joseph Levy met the Tisch Brothers, Larry and Bob, at a cocktail party, according to the 2001 “Wall Street People,” and convinced them to lease the McAlpin.

The Tiches spent $1 million to modernize and rehabilitate the hotel, resulting in a 20% increase in the occupancy rate and increased room rates. Within two years Levy sold the money-making hotel to the Sheraton chain for $9 million which renamed it the Sheraton-McAlpin and then the Sheraton-Atlantic.

In the meantime, the unique Marine Grill had been closed for several years and sat vacant and dusty until 1960 when it re-opened as an unexceptional restaurant. The astounding terra cotta décor remained intact, largely unnoticed, until the mid-1970s when a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission stumbled upon it.

Before long word-of-mouth drew architectural historians to the Grill to ogle the irreplaceable interior. Unfortunately, no one bothered to nominate the one-of-a-kind space for landmark status.

The upper floors are ornamented in exuberant polychrome terra cotta.

In 1989 the Grill was closed and the hotel announced that renovations were being made. Before long, dumpsters on the sidewalk were being filled with shards of the irreplaceable Marine Grill. Rushing in at the last minute, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the New York Landmarks Conservancy and the Municipal Art Society salvaged six of the Fred Dana Marsh murals. The panels were reinstalled along the passageways of the Broadway-Nassau subway station; a $200,000 project that Sandra Bloodworth, director of Arts for Transit said was “the opportunity to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

One of the rescued terra cotta murals -- photo nycsubway.org

In January 1976 foreclosure proceedings were initiated against the hotel and in July it was purchased to be converted to 700 rental apartments.  As the hotel emptied of guests, 30 elderly long-time residents refused to leave their apartments, causing a temporary delay in the plans.

The building was renovated again in 2001 to condominiums, called the Herald Towers.

From the street, Frank Mills Andrews’ terra cotta encrusted Hotel McAlpin looks much as it did on opening day 1912, a dignified and handsome structure.

non-credited photographs taken by the author