The First Plaza Hotel

The site did not remain a skating rink for long. Its view of Central Park and its Fifth Avenue address clearly made it one of the prime corners in the rapidly growing city, and in 1880, the land was purchased for $850,000 by a group of real estate speculators who planned to erect an apartment hotel. A loan was secured from the New York Life Insurance Company, and Carl Pfeiffer was hired as the architect and John C. Phyfe and James Campbell as the builders. Construction began in 1883, but it was doomed from the start: Phyfe and Campbell soon were over budget, and after five years of litigation, New York Life foreclosed on the half-finished building. Following more complicated financing and endless debate, the firm of McKim, Mead and White was hired to refit the uncompleted structure into a luxury hotel.

The Italian Renaissance result (here) was finally achieved at a cost of $3 million and opened on October 1, 1890. Eight stories tall, with four hundred rooms, it was considered very fine in its day. Indeed, the line of hansom cabs parked along the entrance suggests a bustling establishment. The asphalt-lined open plaza in front of the hotel (from which it took its name) had been cut out of the city’s street-grid plan for use as a carriage turnaround; there was an entrance to Central Park to the north, and it was thought that heavy traffic would necessitate such a space. As the photograph suggests, this traffic never materialized. It was not until 1916 that the area was relandscaped as a pedestrian mall, and in 1923, it was officially named Grand Army Plaza.

Here, both sides of a souvenir trade card promoting the property, given out at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.