Superficial Similarities

When I came across this 1899 picture in the New York Public Library archive, it came with a lot of déjà vu:

A hotel on Fifth Avenue burning in the late 1890s…I’ve talked a fair amount over the years about the burning of the Windsor Hotel at Fifth and 46th Street.

(Even the fact that the names of both hotels are based on English royalty feels like a bad joke until you remember the overwhelming Anglophilia of Victorian US.) There were significant differences however, starting with size. The Windsor filled a full blockfront:

If we ignore the interior light courts, that’s 28,000 square feet per floor for a total of just under 200,000 square feet. (That’s about 20,000 square meters for people who use a more popular unit system.) The Hanover, on the other hand:

was about 12,000 square feet per floor over six stories (the five noted on the map plus a mansard roof) for about 72,000 square feet, divided into 40 or so apartments. The picture of the fire calls it an “apartment hotel” which basically means it was an upscale apartment house, as the laws in New York at the time only recognized two types of multiple dwelling: tenements and hotels. The New York Times account of the fire (March 17, 1898) gives some clues, calling it a “fashionable family resort,” giving a long list of the upper-class occupants, and stating that “its contents, including valuable antique furniture, paintings, and bric-à-brac to the value of many thousands of dollars” were damaged. The most clear hint is buried halfway down the article: “the hotel is owned by the Haight estate, the representative of which is Dr. David L. Haight, who lives in the house.” Daytonian in Manhattan, as usual, did the research: the hotel had been the Haight family house before it was converted to being a hotel. And sure enough, here it is 1879:

The house, constructed in the 1840s for a wealthy family, was almost certainly built heavier and to a higher standard than the average building in New York in the nineteenth century. The Windsor, on the other hand, catered to transients – in other words, it was an actual hotel – and was (retroactively) famous for being built entirely of wood except for its exterior walls. It burned to the ground in well under an hour because not only the floors, but the stairs, elevator shafts, and dumbwaiter shafts were wood. The day after the fire, there was nothing left at the Windsor site; the Hanover, on the other hand, was repaired and returned to use. The fact that the Hanover was demolished in 1905 had to do with changing demographics – wealthy people were moving uptown and the hotel’s site was more valuable for a larger building – rather than the effects of the fire.