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“perfect fairy palace—beautiful beyond description,” he reported that it drew an average of six thousand visitors each day, “double the population of Hannibal.” On October 5, 1858, however, a fire broke out in one of the Palace’s storage rooms. Although its cast-iron beams were believed to render the building fireproof, the flames spread quickly through some 750,000 board feet of wood flooring. In the intense heat, the roof and walls literally melted away, and within minutes the entire structure had collapsed in a spectacular shower of sparks and smoke. All of the two thousand visitors inside that day escaped with their lives, but the contents were lost. Scavengers later picked through the rubble looking for souvenirs, and a certain Mrs. Richardson went into business selling “vitrified masses of glass, metals, &c.” They were, she said, relics “of the finest building ever erected in America.”

PALACES FOR TRAVELERS

Before its blazing demise, the Crystal Palace, by boosting New York’s tourist trade, had nourished an ongoing spate of hotel construction. Until mid-century, the premier hostelry had continued to be the elegant Astor House, on Broadway opposite City Hall, just down the street from Stewart’s Marble Palace. But as Manhattan’s commercial center of gravity shifted northwards in the fifties, Astor House came to seem too “downtown.” Spurred by vast ranks of Crystal Palace gazers and burgeoning numbers of commercial travelers, dozens of hotels sprang up. Nineteen deluxe establishments appeared on Broadway alone between 1850 and 1854.

Grandest of these newcomers was the six-story, six-hundred-room St. Nicholas Hotel (1853), whose white marble facade dominated the west side of Broadway between Broome and Spring streets, fourteen blocks above the Astor House. Its guests, upward of eight hundred at a time, were pampered by a million dollars’ worth of walnut wainscotting, frescoed ceilings, and such technological wonders as gas-light chandeliers (supplied by Haughwout’s across the street), hot running water, central heating, annunciators, a telegraph in the lobby, and steam-powered washing machines in the basement. There were opulent parlors for gentlemen and ladies, a richly ornamented reading room, and a stately main dining room where a regiment of liveried servants (mostly Irish) escorted guests to their seats. Downstairs, right next to the hotel’s main entrance, was Phalon’s Hair-Dressing Establishment, the most fashionable place in town for gentlemen to be shaved, barbered, and groomed with grease, scent, and pale rum. It was, said one English visitor in 1853, “like an introduction to the palace of some Eastern prince.”

The St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway, flagship of the new fleet of hotels built to accommodate the city’s burgeoning tourist trade in the 1850s. Lithograph by F. Heppenheimer. (© Museum of the City of New York)

Other hotels nestled within a few blocks of the St. Nicholas, interspersed among Broadway’s emporiums and theaters—like the Metropolitan (on the corner of Prince, next to Niblo’s Garden), famous for its “sky parlors” that allowed lady guests to observe the well-dressed throngs below. Additional grand establishments situated themselves along Broadway, marking fashion’s uptown progress. James Renwick’s St. Denis held down the corner of 11th Street across from the new and very stylish Grace Church; the Clarendon Hotel, famous for its huge bathtubs, overlooked Union Square; and the wave crested at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, three blocks below the New York and Harlem’s Madison Square Depot, where in 1859 Amos Eno opened his Fifth Avenue Hotel. Costing two million dollars and employing four hundred servants, the Fifth Avenue was hailed as the most spectacular building of its kind yet erected in the city: “a larger and handsomer building than Buckingham Palace,” raved a correspondent for the London Times who came to New York the following year with the prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). Among other wonders, the Fifth Avenue offered private bathrooms, an unprecedented extravagance,