Cosmopolitan Hotel (New York City)

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The Cosmopolitan Hotel (now also known as Cosmopolitan Tribeca ) is a hotel in the Manhattan borough of New York . It is in the Tribeca neighborhood at the Chambers Street corner West Broadway and one of the oldest hotels in New York City; it is sometimes referred to as the oldest hotel in town. Originally a hotel for business travelers, it now attracts budget-conscious tourists because of its subway location .

history

In 1844 and 1845, the merchant, entrepreneur and banker James Boorman (1783–1866), who immigrated from England as a child, had a hotel built on the northeast corner of Chambers and Broadway streets. For several years, the previous residential use in this area had been replaced by the creation of office and commercial space. The four- story building was made of red brick, in the neo-Gothic style that was popular at the time, and on the first floor it was equipped with a surrounding cast-iron balcony (as is typical for New Orleans ). Boorman was the founder of the Hudson River Railroad Company , whose southernmost depot (terminus) was planned opposite the new building and was realized in 1852; from here the rails ran along Hudson and Canal Streets across the Hudson River . The railway line later became part of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad , now the New York Central Railroad . Until the station opened, Boorman rented the upper floors to Ann Andrews, who ran a guesthouse here.

In 1852 the hotel and restaurant business was started by John A. Davis. The hotel, named Girard House, opened in 1853; it was mainly used to accommodate rail travelers. In 1852 was at the Chambers page instead of a brick house acquired by Boorman and demolished ( 125, Chambers , until then the seat of the jewelry store of Charles Lewis Tiffany ) an extension of the appointed date on this side of the road with nine window axes building carried out by another three window axes. This extension was given an "Italian" facade.

On October 1st, 1859, the water boiler in the basement of the hotel exploded during repair work. One of the plumbers died, the other was seriously injured, the hairdressing shop above the boiler room and other parts of the ground floor were destroyed. In 2009 , the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC ) contradicted the often-voiced claim that Abraham Lincoln stayed here on the occasion of his famous Cooper Union speech on February 27, 1860 .

Cosmopolitan

In 1869 the brothers Samuel J., Nathaniel and John P. Huggins bought the Girard House . They had the building raised by two more floors and equipped with an attic . The name was changed to Cosmopolitan . The hotel now had 400 beds, telephones in the guest rooms and was equipped with elevators from Otis Brothers . Around this time, the railway terminus was relocated, with the result that the hotel lost its rail travel customers. Nevertheless, it was used by business people in the decades that followed. In an article in the New York Times on February 26, 1894, it was reported that the wealthy businessman Benjamin Low from Massachusetts , who stayed here, was found dead and robbed on a nearby street. Shortly before the turn of the century, the formerly red hotel was given a light exterior paint job. Charles W. Wildey took over management of the hotel in the 1890s.

In 1913 the house was completely refurbished and reopened after a year. The main entrance on the Chambers (now a narrow side entrance) and the large lobby have been greatly reduced in size; instead, shops have been set up on the street side. The dining room was converted into a tobacco shop. The owner at the time, Joseph M. Weintraub, invested around $ 250,000 in the renovations, with the reinforcement of the foundations alone accounting for $ 70,000, as the newly built subway threatened to damage them. In the 1920s and 1930s, under the leadership of Weintraub, it was highly regarded and popular as accommodation with passing politicians and lawyers. In November 1937, a hotel guest, Waldemar Wengorra, set a fire in his room. Five guests were injured.

Bond and renaming

In the 1960s the hotel was renamed Bond and now served as a Single Room Occupancy (SRO) residence. The former hotel rooms were rented as one-room apartments to families or individuals of lower income groups. According to a report in the New York Times from 1967, a homeless man staying in Bond was arrested for stabbing a customer of a shop on the ground floor in an argument. In the following years the hotel business was resumed, in 1989 a seventh floor was added to the building and the name changed back to Cosmopolitan .

The building belongs to the Do-Bar Hotel Corporation (owners: Jay Wartski and Gerald Barad), which has been building a six-story brick extension on the Broadway side as far as Reade Street since 2015 . The architect of the new building is Matthew Gottsegen. Gottsegens' draft was approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in September 2009 , after a previous draft was rejected in June 2009.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to Stanley Turkel, Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels in New York (see LitVerz), the Cosmopolitan TriBeCa was named the oldest hotel in New York in the Hotel Gazette on April 1, 1933 (Article: Oldest Hotel in New York ). The New York Tribune named it the oldest hotel in Lower Manhattan on April 17, 1921 (Article: Cosmopolitan Oldest Hotel in Lower Manhattan ). According to article The Granddaddy of Them All by Christopher Gray on October 8, 2009 in The New York Times , it is possibly the oldest hotel in New York ( Possibly New York's oldest hotel structure ).
  2. ↑ a b c By Cristian Salazar, Inside NYC's oldest hotels: Celebrity tales, literary wunderkinds and one famous cat: Cosmopolitan Hotel , March 18, 2015, AM New York (in English)
  3. ↑ James Boorman (1783-1866): First Benefactor of The New York Institute ( Memento of the original from March 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , The New York Institute for Special Education (in English)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nyise.org
  4. ↑ a b c d e Tom Miller, The Cosmopolitan Hotel - Chambers and West Broadway , May 21, 2014 at the Daytonian in Manhattan (blog, in English)
  5. ↑ a b Julie Shapiro, Don't be subtle, make a statement, city tells Cosmo architects , issue 5.-11. June 2009, Downtown Express (in English)
  6. ↑ Robbed while he was dying; but Benjamin Low's death was due to natural causes , February 26, 1894, retrieved from the archives of the New York Times for a fee

Web links

Coordinates: 40 ° 42 ′ 55.5 ″  N , 74 ° 0 ′ 33.6 ″  W.