What was on the minds of the well-heeled New Yorkers who chose to celebrate Thanksgiving 1899 at the Broadway Central Hotel—a French Empire–style beauty on Broadway between West Third and Bond Streets?
Most likely the dinner menu, for one, which was loaded with French-inflected options worthy of a gluttonous holiday feast. Numerous starter courses included oysters, two soup options (cream of artichoke, mmm), and stuffed olives.
After the starters, it was time to order an entree. Which one to choose—the classic “Vermont” turkey with chestnut stuffing and cranberry sauce? Or perhaps something less Thanksgiving-ish, like the stewed terrapin, Baltimore style; Boston gosling and apple sauce; or broiled quail on toast with watercress.
Salads, cold meats (“home-made hog’s head cheese,” yum!), and vegetables would be served next, followed by the dessert and cheese courses. It stands to reason that no one staggered out of the dining room (one of three in the Broadway Central) at the end of the meal without a full stomach.
What else would diners be thinking that night? Many might have reflected on the hotel itself. An eight-story, 600-room hotel opened in 1870, the Broadway Central—known as the Grand Central until 1892—was long an opulent resort for Gilded Age New York’s political and business elite.
Diamond Jim Brady and theater stars were regulars as well, according to Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog.
Some Thanksgiving guests may have recalled the spectacular crime that took place there 27 years earlier, a murder fueled by lust and greed in full view of the public.
“On Jan. 6, 1872, James Fisk Jr., a playboy financier who had helped milk the Erie Railroad into bankruptcy, was shot to death on the hotel’s staircase by Edward Stiles Stokes, his former partner,” recalled the New York Times in 2015. “The two men had fought in a bitter lawsuit, and Mr. Stokes had fallen in love with Mr. Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield.”
What the 1899 Thanksgiving customers probably weren’t considering was how the hotel would fare in the 20th century—when the city’s power brokers followed the flow of commerce to Midtown, and the Broadway Central would begin its slow decline.
As the 1900s progressed, “the hotel was the scene of many weddings, and a few murders and suicides,” wrote the New York Times in the 2015 article. “As the years passed, it went through a series of owners and financial difficulties.”
“By the late 1960s, it had become one of the city’s largest welfare hotels. Six theaters, called the Mercer Arts Center, were built inside in hopes of perking up the place, and it was renamed the University Hotel, but it had severe structural problems.”
By the early 1970s, the hotel was at the center of controversy. Locals didn’t appreciate having a welfare hotel in the neighborhood, and New York Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz deemed it a “den of rape, dope, and murder,” per a 1973 article in New York Newsday.
And then it was gone. Around 5 p.m. on August 3, 1973, residents inside the hotel began hearing rumbling noises. Plaster fell from the ceiling, and the noises escalated. “It sounded like a rifle shot,” one resident told Newsday, “and then the whole structure collapsed.”
After years of neglect and structural damages, the center of this formerly fashionable hotel was reduced to a pile of rubble. Four residents died in the collapse, and about 300 others, many elderly and impoverished, lost their home. No one was ever charged criminally.
In its place now stands a New York University dormitory for law students. If that dorm is open this Thanksgiving, I doubt the dining hall will serve a meal quite as impressive as the Broadway Central did 125 years ago.
[Top image: via Reddit; second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: lawbookexchange.com; fourth image: AP via Staten Island Advance; fifth image: MCNY, x2011.34.239]
