The 1900 Century Hotel - 119 West 45th Street

 

photo by Sean Khorsandi

Maxwell S. Mannes, a highly active real estate operator and developer, purchased the three-story former house at 119 West 45th Street from Lefferts and Agnes M. Strebeigh on June 29, 1899.  In the rear yard was a two-story brick building.  Mannes paid $25,000 for the property--about $975,000 in 2025 terms.

Within a year, Mannes opened the Century Hotel on the site.  Designed by the architectural firm of Israels & Harder, the six-story structure was clad in red brick and limestone.  Drawing from Tudor and Italian Renaissance precedents, the architects focused greatly on fenestration--the facade being as much glass as masonry.  The second and third floor windows were flanked by brick panels framed in stone.  The elliptically arched second-floor openings were capped with layered, scrolled keystones and those of the square, angled bays of the third floor wore dignified molded cornices.  

Israels & Harder framed the fourth and fifth floors with stone quoins.  The windows, including faceted oriels at the fourth, shared limestone frames.  Paneled brick pilasters separated the openings of the sixth floor under a cast metal cornice with foliate brackets.

The Century Hotel was a "bachelors' hotel," a concept that was popularized in the 1880s.  The number of unmarried men in the city skyrocketed between 1870 to 1890, when about 45 percent of the male population was single.  In 1890, The Real Estate Record & Builders Guide called the bachelor flat, “a product of our modern life.  It is not a social fad, ready to disappear directly.  It has ceased to be a novelty.  It has come to stay, for it filled a gap in the life of every unmarried man who has become weary of the boarding house, the furnished room, or the hotel.”

Bachelors' hotels offered the necessities of an unmarried man--a parlor, a bedroom and a bathroom.  Bachelors were presumed to be unable or unwilling to cook for themselves, so bachelor apartments did not have kitchens.  The Century Hotel had four apartments per floor--two in the front and two in the rear.

Architectural Record, July 1901 (copyright expired)

Rents ranged from $35 to $50 per month, about $1,930 for the most expensive today.  Occupants would enjoy "hotel services," which included maid service and hall boys, who delivered mail and other sundry tasks.

Among the early residents was Henry Romeike, born in Riga, then part of Russia, on November 17, 1855.  Educated in Russia and Germany, he began collecting press clippings while living in England.  Romeike opened the first press clipping bureau in the world.  He immigrated to New York City in 1885 and established his business here.  The New York Times explained, "Politicians, lawyers, and heads of great enterprises found it of great value to know what the newspapers had to say of themselves and of their adversaries."  

Romeike's clients included, according to The Times, "Americans of prominence and many royal personages."  The newspaper said, "Few persons of any prominence were disappointed when they applied to him to learn the world's opinion of themselves as reflected in the public press."

On June 3, 1901, the 48-year-old suffered a heart attack in his apartment.  Newspaperdom reported, "His death was almost instantaneous.  Dr. Frauenthal...was hastily summoned, but he found Mr. Romeike beyond aid."

The Sun, July 18, 1900 (copyright expired)

Living in the Century at the time were James E. McGahen, the treasurer of the American Bridge Company; and Dr. John English McWhorter, a clinical assistant in diseases of the genito-urinary system at the Medical School of Columbia University.

"Jack" C. Wilmerding moved into the Century Hotel in 1907.  Fifteen years earlier, on March 25, 1892, the New-York Tribune reported, "Miss Marie de Lex Allen, daughter of Colonel Vanderbilt Allen, was married to John Christopher Wilmerding, jr. yesterday at noon in the chantry of Grace Church."  The bride was the great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt I.  The marriage had a rocky start.

In March 1898, Marie was committed to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.  Asylums were a common means by which spouses or relatives disposed of troublesome family members.  Marie's society friends rallied to her aid, prompting a hearing that summer.

Marie testified that she had been forced to marry Wilmerding by her stepmother.  On August 9, 1898, the Chicago Tribune quoted her, "I was obliged to marry Jack Wilmerding by the influence that woman brought to bear upon my father...Jack Wilmerding was a brute.  Why, he struck me in the face in a ballroom even before we were married.  I was obliged to marry him under threats that my character would be ruined if I didn't."  She told the court, "He beat me, and insulted me, and cried our troubles from the rooftops."

Now, in the spring of 1907, Jack Wilmerding was living alone in the Century Hotel.  He sued for divorce on April 6, alleging that Marie had fled to England where she was living with James Coates.  Although she and Wilmerding were still married, she and Coates had an "alleged marriage ceremony" in London on January 14, 1907, according to Wilmerding.

Edmund Mitchell moved into the Century Hotel in October 1916 on an extended business trip.  His permanent home was in Los Angeles where his wife and daughter lived.  An author and journalist, he was born in 1861 in Glasgow, Scotland.  Mitchell graduated from Aberdeen University in 1881 and became an editorial writer for The Glasgow Herald, The Melbourne Times and The Los Angeles Times.  Among his several fictional books are The Temple of Death, Plotters of Paris and The Despoilers.  

On April 1, 1917, the New York Herald reported that a maid entered Mitchell's apartment to make the bed and "found the body of the author lying across it."  Mitchell had suffered a heart attack.

The property was sold and renovated in 1920.  Now called the Rialto Apartments, an advertisement in the New York Herald on July 12, 1921, offered, "just completed" and "newly furnished" two-room-and-bath apartments at $30 and up weekly, and $125 and up monthly.  (The least expensive monthly rent would equal about $2,000 today.)

Like Jack Wilmerding, motion picture actor Kenneth D. Harlan moved into a Rialto apartment amid marital upheaval.  On October 15, 1921, his wife, Florence C. Harlan, filed suit for separation.  Prior to her marriage, she was Flo Hart, a showgirl with the Ziegfeld Follies.  The couple was married in June 1920 and soon afterward Harlan "began treating her cruelly."  Florence testified, "on Christmas Day he threw her around the room and on December 31 hurled her against a window so that she almost fell out," reported The New York Times.  On July 24, 1921, she alleged, he "threw her into the gutter, banged her head on the sidewalk, and then abandoned her."

A 1918 publicity photo Kenneth Harlan  (copyright expired)

Florence told The New York Clipper that while they were in California where he was making a movie, they were happy.  "Kenneth didn't get much attention.  Women didn't pet him or make a fuss over him."  That changed, she said, when they moved back to New York.  "When we came here they went wild about him.  He treated me in an inhuman manner, beating me."  She told the reporter, "I don't want to cause my husband any trouble.  He was a good boy.  Women spoiled him."

Harlan would have a 25-year career in motion pictures, making 200 feature films and serials.  His most famous role came in 1923 in the title role of The Virginian.  Florence would not be the last of his wives to file for divorce--there would be a total of nine.

Novelist and poet Maxwell Bodenheim had an apartment here in 1928.  Born in 1892, he and other writers including Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser founded The Chicago Literary Times in 1923.  In New York, he became a favorite of the Greenwich Village Bohemian community, including being a member of the Raven Poetry Circle.  His books of verse, including his 1923 Against This Age and the 1928 The King of Spain made him a leading American author.

Maxwell Bodenheim, New York World-Telegram & Sun, 1919 (copyright expired)

Bodenheim apparently used this apartment as a pied-à-terre at best, or for extra-marital trysts at worst.  He was married and had an eight-year-old son.  

On July 19, 1928, the body of 24-year-old Virginia Drew was pulled from the Hudson River.  The New York Times reported that she had committed suicide, "shortly after she had left the apartment of Maxwell Bodenheim...whom she had chosen as her adviser in letters."  Virginia had gone to Bodenheim's apartment in the Rialto supposedly to show him the manuscripts of two novels she had written.  She was seen leaving the apartment around 1:30 the next morning.  Virginia went directly to the river and threw herself in.

Detectives who attempted to interview Bodenheim, "found he had left his apartment," reported The New York Times.  He had left New York the day after Virginia's death with two suitcases and a portable typewriter.  One of Virginia's friends told detectives that she had told her of a "suicide compact" she had made with "a literary light."

Maud Drew, Virginia's mother, thought her daughter's death was not merely a suicide.  "It was foul play," she told officials.  "Virginia did not jump into the water.  She was killed."  She pointed out that Virginia was the second pupil of Bodenheim who "became despondent recently."  She said that less than two weeks ago, "a 19-year-old girl was found unconscious in her apartment in Greenwich Village" with gas escaping from the stove.

The teenaged girl was Gladys Loeb.  Now, she too, was missing.  When her father, Dr. Martin J. Loeb, read the reports of Virginia's suicide, he trailed Bodenheim to Provincetown, Massachusetts.  He searched house-to-house, according to The New York Times, asking for the whereabouts of the novelist.  With police accompanying him, he confronted Bodenheim, who admitted that Gladys was on the way there from Boston.  Before leaving for the train station to intercept Gladys, Loeb warned Bodenheim to stay away from his daughter.  "I'll be very pleased to stay away from her," he replied.

A renovation completed in 1929 resulted in a store on the ground floor.  The hotel was renamed the Hotel Normandie.  

A sign on the Normandy notes that transient guests were now accommodated. via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

Living here in 1937 was empresario Mischa Ross (born Mischa Rosenbaum).  The 31-year-0ld was estranged from his 20-year-old wife and their 3-year-old daughter.  The estrangement was likely the result of Ross's romantic affair with a violinist, 24-year-old Julia Nussenbaum.  

The couple met in 1935 at an audition for Ross's and his brother's musical troupe.  Julia was hired at $40 per week to play in an act with five other musicians and three dancers.  An affair developed.  According to Julia's sister, Edith Schnee, Julia was unaware that Ross was married. 

On Sunday afternoon April 18, 1937, Julia's "hammer-bludgeoned body," as described by The New York Times, was discovered in a rehearsal studio.  A bloodied hammer was found at the scene.  Investigators went to the Hotel Normandie.  Among those they interviewed was the superintendent, James Cockrell.  He recognized the hammer as being his.  He told investigators, "he went to Ross's fifth-floor room Thursday morning to repair some drapery.  He left a kit of tools inadvertently and returning later discovered the hammer was missing."  A grand jury indicted Mischa Ross for first-degree murder on April 21, 1937.

By the early 1980s, the name of the Hotel Normandie was spelled Normandy.  It was now being operated by the city as a welfare hotel.  City Council President Carol Bellamy declared that the families housed here had "an average of three school-age children each."  

The Normandy operated as a welfare hotel until around the turn of the century, when the building was converted to the Big Apple Hostel.  Then, in 2018, it returned to a main-line hostelry, the Merrion Hotel.  On December 31, 2018, The New York Times food critic Florence Fabricant commented on the ground floor restaurant.  "Named for a street in central Dublin, this theater-district pub in a new boutique hotel takes a fairly traditional route when it comes to pub fare, like fish and chips, burgers, smoked salmon and a seafood chowder."

image via michelin.com

Throughout its several phases, the former Century Hotel building has survived without extensive outward changes.