Esther Crain's Blog, page 25

The baby cage craze never really caught on in New York City in the early 1900s

It probably sounded like a worthy solution at the time, a way for babies living in airless city tenements to get fresh air and sunshine.

Both were absolutely essential to development, according to an influential 1884 childcare book by Luther Emmett Holt, MD. Holt was a pioneering pediatrician and the head of New York City’s first Babies’ Hospital in 1889. In his book, Holt advocated “airing out” infants to “renew and purify the blood.”

“In the crowded sections of the big cities the ‘baby brigade,’ with a nurse girl or mother standing watch over each infant, has long been a familiar sight,” stated one New York newspaper in 1913. “If a baby is to thrive it must, of course, be kept out in the open air and sunshine.”

But as the newspaper also noted, “this has meant that somebody must constantly stand guard to see that no harm befalls” the baby.

Enter the baby cage, invented by Mrs. Robert C. Lafferty from both Baltimore and New York, per the newspaper. It was a cage-like contraption that would stick out of a window like a modern-day air conditioner in which a baby can safely be placed.

The idea was that while baby sat and played and absorbed fresh air and sunlight inside this screened-in box affixed to the window frame, mom could tend to other issues in the home without worrying that her child would be in harm’s way.

The first version of what was termed the “health crib” made its debut in 1913. Made of “willow latticed walls” and covered in mosquito netting to keep out insects, the newspaper noted that “the top is solid to protect the infant from articles that might be dropped through” from apartments on higher floors.

Ten years later, a new version of the health crib was created by a Washington State woman named Emma Read. Her patented “baby cage” had a floor and roof made of sheet metal to keep out the elements. The walls were outfitted with wire “admitting plenty of air and light,” per another New York newspaper, which added this commentary:

“The occupant of the cage cannot possibly fall out, is protected against rain or snow, and enjoys the healthful advantage of unlimited fresh air,” the newspaper noted. “In pleasant weather the child may be kept all day in the outdoor house, eating, sleeping, and amusing itself therein, while under observation from inside the room.”

Did parents stuck in Gotham’s neighborhoods of sunless tenements rush out to buy baby cages? Apparently they were popular in London, but information on and photos of New York City moms and dads putting their kids in them has been hard to come by.

The exception, though, is Eleanor Roosevelt, who reportedly recalled of her years as a young mother that she “knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.” She created a baby cage for her daughter Anna in 1906—before the health crib or Read’s baby cage hit the market.

Anna was Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first child (third photo), born when the couple was living in a brownstone at 125 East 36th Street (fourth photo). Knowing the prevailing advice about babies and fresh air thanks to her work at settlement houses, 22-year-old Eleanor “had a wire box attached high above the ground on a side of the house that received no sunlight,” stated author Jan Pottker in her 2005 book, Sara and Eleanor.

Anna was placed in this “jerry-rigged contraption” for a length of time every day as decreed by Eleanor, and the baby subsequently “screamed from the cold and neglect,” wrote Pottker. Finally “a neighbor threatened to call the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.”

At that, Eleanor brought Anna inside and stopped the regular airing.

[Top image: The Keene Sentinal; second image: rarehistoricalphotos.com; third image: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum; fourth image: Larry Gertner for the Historical Marker Database; fifth image: rarehistoricalphotos.com]

An airship floats through the cloudless skies above 1930s Manhattan

I’m not sure I’d feel safe traveling in an airship. I’ve heard that recording of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster too many times.

But I can’t stop gazing at these photos of airships floating through the skies of early 1930s Manhattan, with the modern machine-age cityscape spread out and on display, building by building.

Both of these photos show the US Navy’s USS Akron. In the first photo, we see downtown Manhattan: the Woolworth Building, the Singer Tower (RIP), a smaller Battery Park—or at least it seems smaller. What’s the green space in the center, what look like treetops?

Manhattan is more slender in this photo. Without the landfill from the digging of the World Trade Center, there’s no Battery Park City on the Hudson side. Ship traffic ruled.

In the second photo, the USS Akron is hovering closer to Central Park. The contours of the East River can be seen; the sun seems to shine on the elegant high-rises and towers of Central Park South and Fifth Avenue.

Manhattan is a giant rectangle here, neatly divided by wide avenues. The Gothic roofline of the Plaza Hotel comes into view. The Central Park Reservoir dominates the park. I never realized it stretched from the East Side almost all the way to the West.

[Images: Wikipedia]

A huge new home for 19th century orphans in the countryside of today’s Riverside Drive

It was 23 years after the end of the Revolutionary War. Before the launch of the Children’s Aid Society, before New York’s Gilded Age benevolent groups focused on the plight of vulnerable kids, before city welfare organizations, there was the New York Orphan Asylum Society.

Founded in 1806 by elite female citizens like Elizabeth Hamilton (below image), the recent widow of Alexander, and Isabella Graham (also a widow and founder of a number of charitable organizations), the Society sought to protect orphans from ending up in the public almshouse.

At the time, an orphan was a child who lost both parents—or who had one living parent unable to care for them. (Often, these kids were called “half-orphans.”) Adding to the city’s orphan population were immigrant children whose parents died on their journey to America.

Exactly how many orphans existed in New York at the dawn of the 19th century isn’t clear; the city population hovered under 100,000. But after the Civil War, with population at roughly one million, their numbers were estimated to be in the tens of thousands.

Whatever the number was, Hamilton, Graham (below image), and the rest of the women in the Society were deeply moved by their plight. That year, the organization rented a small house on West Fourth Street (after which became known as Asylum Street) in Greenwich Village. There, 16 orphans lived with and were looked after by an older couple, according to Village Preservation.

By 1807, the Society needed more space. “The second home of the Asylum was a 50 feet square brick building capable of housing 200 orphans” on land just north of the first building, states Village Preservation. Unlike the first orphan home, which was funded with private donations, the second one relied on a combination of private money, city and state funds, and bank loans.

“Although Greenwich Village was a good choice for the [Asylum’s] launch, environmental and health pressures soon forced yet another move,” stated Village Preservation. By 1839, the society relocated to a large facility in the Bloomingdale section of Manhattan at today’s 73rd Street, per Pam Tice in a piece in Bloomingdalehistory.com.

Why so far out of the city, which was about five miles south? Bloomingdale was a relatively remote area of small farms and a smattering of wealthy estate houses. Land was more abundant and less expensive than it was downtown.

The New York Orphan Asylum wasn’t the only facility that decided to make Bloomingdale home. Other orphanages included the Leake and Watts Orphan House (now the site of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine) and the Children’s Fold (100th Street and the Boulevard, aka Broadway), per Tice. These institutional settings were preceded by the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, where Columbia University stands today.

Spanning 73rd to 74th Streets, the new Asylum continued to serve the city’s orphans. A school was established, as was an infant nursery. According to the Society’s annual report from 1876, a total of 188 boys and girls were residents, down from 217 the year before. A $37K budget paid for clothing, bedding, fuel, laundry, furniture, books, medical needs, as well as the salaries of employees, including teachers and “matrons” who kept an eye on the children.

“From most of those who have left us to occupy various situations in life, letters are constantly received by those ladies who became their correspondents, telling of happy homes, good kind friends, and some speaking of growth in Christian grace and knowledge,” noted the Society’s secretary, M.L.R. Satterlee.

By the end of the 19th century, the Asylum’s future in Bloomingdale wasn’t looking bright. What was now known as the “West End” of Manhattan was undergoing rapid development into a high-class residential area of Beaux-Arts row houses and stand-alone mansions.

In 1900, the Asylum moved once again, this time to Westchester. In the coming decades, the New York Orphan Asylum Society became Graham Windham, a New York–based organization that helps children and families in crisis and still exists today.

And what about the facility and the land it sat on, which now had a Riverside Drive address? The Society sold them to Charles M. Schwab, a steel magnate. Schwab promptly tore down the orphanage and built himself an 86-room French chateau-style mansion.

Completed in 1906, Schwab’s mansion was one of the largest private homes ever built in New York City—a totem of Gilded Age excess lasting until the 1940s.

Find out more about the Schwab Mansion and the other palatial homes and townhouses of Gilded Age Riverside Drive by joining Ephemeral New York on a walking tour December 16! Click this link for more info.

[Top image: New-York Historical Society; second image: Wikipedia; third image: NYPL Digital Collection; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collection; sixth image: MCNY 93.1.1.241; seventh image: MCNY 93.1.1.244; eighth image: NYPL Digital Collection]

This elegant object in a historic East Side synagogue had a lowly but crucial function

There’s incredible beauty inside the Museum at Eldridge Street, the stunningly restored synagogue originally opened in 1887.

The physical building—with its stained glass windows and Moorish style—is an astounding remnant of a long-dispersed Eastern European Jewish community that packed into the narrow streets of the Lower East Side in the late 19th and early 20th century.

But it’s the artifacts inside that help tell the story of this historic sanctuary, from the brilliant brass chandeliers (originally gas-lit, then electrified) to the worn pine floorboards, where congregants would kneel to pray and leave “their physical imprint on the space,” per the Museum website.

And on display on a platform is a blue and white ceramic bowl (top photo). Its lowly yet important purpose? To collect spit from worshippers who would otherwise “expectorate” on the synagogue floor.

Seeing a spittoon in a house of worship might seem a little strange. But a century or so ago, these “cuspidors” were common everywhere men gathered: restaurants, clubs, hotels, railroad cars, banks, and bars (below photo shows the spittoons at J.J. Corbett’s Salon at Sixth Avenue and 33rd Street).

“Nineteenth-century America had a spitting problem,” explains the website for the Tenement Museum. “Public spitting . . . was a deeply engrained aspect of male culture. The use of chewing tobacco was nearly universal among the working class, while pipe tobacco and cigars became a status symbol for wealthier Americans.”

The male worshippers at the Eldridge Street Synagogue had picked up the spitting habit. According to a 2012 post on the Museum’s Facebook page, “the congregation at Eldridge Street would order [spittoons] at the start of the Jewish New Year. They were a way of keeping decorum. Spitting in a receptacle versus on the floor.”

Traditionally, a spittoon was placed on the floor. Exactly where it would have been in the Eldridge Street Synagogue is unclear. The main sanctuary was closed in the 1940s due to the dwindling congregation, then reopened to the public after the 20-year restoration was completed in 2007.

Thanks to turn-of-the-century laws outlawing public spitting (New York passed its first one in 1896), the practice has died down. Spittoons that once graced the floors of many city buildings and houses of worship are now more likely to be artifacts in museum collections like the one on Eldridge Street.

[Second image: Rhododendrites/Wikipedia; third image: MCNY 93.1.1.2206]

This lonely First Avenue pay phone is a relic from another New York City

Through most of the 20th century, they could be found all over the city: on street corners, in hotels, drugstores, and restaurants, inside schools, libraries, train stations, and other public buildings.

But it’s been at least a few decades since cell phones arrived and the lowly coin-operated pay phone was relegated to history’s dustbin.

So spotting one of these coin-operated phones inside an ordinary D’Agostino’s on First Avenue at 53rd Street feels like coming across a relic. There’s no dial tone, and the chrome is appropriately scratched up. A Bell Telephone icon sits above a pre-21st century Verizon logo.

At 50 cents per call, I’d date this one back to the 1990s.

Perhaps it isn’t so unusual that pay phones can still be found here and there in private businesses. Just don’t expect to find a New York City public pay phone unless you’re on one Upper West Side avenue.

Though New York City supposedly removed its last pay phones from Times Square in 2022 (to be part of the collection of The Museum of the City of New York), four public phones inside glass and aluminum booths still remain on West End Avenue.

And an even earlier remnant of the communications era—the wooden phone booth—can sometimes be spotted in prewar-era bars, clubs, and restaurants, though usually the phone itself has vanished.

From Gilded Age beer garden to 1970s strip club: 100 years of vice on a Chelsea corner

There’s a four-story tenement on the traffic-choked corner of Sixth Avenue and 24th Street with some curious signage.

Not the store sign for a now-shuttered ground floor cafe, nor the enormous “for sale” banner spread across the second floor of the facade. (Yikes, is this red-brick beauty in danger?) Signage that’s much more intriguing comes into view when you stand nearby and look up.

On the corner of the building, two brownstone nameplates say, well, “The Corner,” in Victorian-style lettering. Above the cornice is a pediment that reads “The Corner” with “Koster & Bial” underneath.

So what was The Corner, and who were Koster and Bial? The tenement is all that’s left of a theater and beer garden empire that stretched across Sixth Avenue and offered excess beer, edgy performances, and illicit adventures to libertine New Yorkers.

The story begins in the Gilded Age, when this stretch of Sixth Avenue was part of the Tenderloin—a vice district extending to Ninth Avenue from roughly 23rd Street to 42nd Streets that featured theaters, music halls, saloons, gambling dens, disorderly houses, and every other type of lowdown entertainment worthy of a world-class late 19th century metropolis with money to burn.

In 1879, German immigrants brewers John Koster and Albert Bial opened a concert hall at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street. Their holdings up until then included three restaurants near City Hall, plus another in the New York Tribune building on Park Row that became a hangout for “politicians, clubmen, brokers, lawyers, and prominent men about town,” wrote the New York Times.

But operating a theater was a different game, especially when bringing musical acts to New Yorkers was second to Koster and Bial’s main goal of distributing and selling beer.

To make it all work, they tried a new type of entertainment. After taking over another existing theater at 115-117 West 23rd Street, they created a 1200-seat venue that’s credited with being the first to introduce vaudeville to New York City—importing talent from Europe to titillate Gilded Age audiences.

In 1886, The Corner was born. Koster and Bial used the red brick tenement as a beer garden annex for their popular theater. “Music programs were presented in the German style of a beer garden with food and drink part of the offerings,” noted 14to42.net. Inside was a handsome bar, as seen below.

The theater/concert hall (below) and The Corner were bookends for a raucous, rollicking scene—with the kind of suggestive performers Gotham soon couldn’t get enough of. Needless to say, this wasn’t Mrs. Astor’s kind of theater, nor Mrs. Vanderbilt’s.

“Business boomed with the likes of Mademoiselle Armen d’Ary from the Follies Bergere, and Maudi, the Lightning Calculator, but Koster and Bial’s biggest draw was the Spanish dancer Carmencita, who is immortalized in portraits by John Singer Sargent and William M. Chase (below),” wrote John Tauranac in his book, Manhattan’s Little Secrets.

Conductor Victor Herbert served as musical director for Koster & Bial’s, playing the venue with his 40-piece orchestra.

Considering that the theater-music hall was in the Tenderloin, it’s not surprising that Koster & Bial allowed a little hanky panky to go on. Under the stage was a space known as the cork room, decorated with the corks from champagne bottles: “where the stage-door johnnies could cavort with the hoofers in an atmosphere decorously described as ‘fast,'” wrote Tauranac.

Boxes inside a balcony that ran across the theater “served as the scene of the most private kinds of activities,” stated Neil Gould, author of Victor Herbert: A Theatrical Life.

Koster and Bial’s entertainment offerings didn’t last long on 23rd Street or at The Corner. “In 1896, Koster & Bial did close and entered into a brief partnership with Oscar Hammerstein 2d at his 34th Street Manhattan Opera House (on the present site of Macy’s),” explained the New York Times in 1995. 

The partnership created a new Koster & Bial’s, but the venture proved to be disastrous. By the century’s end, both men had died, and their 34th Street theater and roof garden closed its doors in 1901.

That wasn’t the end of illicit activity in the red brick tenement at Sixth Avenue and 24th Street. Almost a century later in a very different Manhattan, infamous strip club Billy’s Topless moved into the space in the mid-1970s.

More of a local dive bar with a small stage for topless dancers and a buffet warmed by cans of sterno, Billy’s was one of those infamous New York establishments that in the 1980s and 1990s was tolerated—if not celebrated—as an anachronistic landmark of a grittier city.

Then the late 1990s arrived, and with it Guiliani-era reforms—specifically a new zoning law that barred sex-related businesses from operating within 500 feet of a residence, school, or house of worship. Now, Billy’s existence was threatened.

In the spirit of Koster and Bial, Billy’s held on. As the law took effect, the dancers began wearing bikini tops, and Billy’s Topless became Billy Stopless, as a 2007 post from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York recalls.

Ultimately Billy’s closed up shop in 2001, ending the tenement’s century-plus run as a site of illicit activity. But the building is for sale; perhaps another vice or sin business will keep the tradition going.

[Third, fourth, and fifth images: NYPL; sixth image: William Merritt Chase/Metmuseum.org; seventh image: Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York]

A painter captures the rich street life of a busy day in Lower Manhattan in 1951

On a busy day in 1951, a hot dog vendor found himself captive to a hawker of cheap jewelry who set up shop across from his rickety food cart decorated with American flags.

Horses still worked the side streets of the city. Stray dogs waited for food scraps to fall to the pavement. TV antennas sprout from tenements; litter collects in the gutter. Corner stores exhibit life and activity.

And a New York artist named Philip Reisman was there, apparently, to capture these and other rich snippets of visual poetry in a painting he titled simply “Busy Day, 1951.”

Born in Poland in 1904, Reisman and his family fled pograms for the safety (and poverty) of New York City. His father discouraged him from studying art, but he took classes at the Arts Student League and found critical recognition and success through the 20th century for his paintings and etchings.

“His early paintings were candid, crowded scenes of the life he saw around him on the Lower East Side of New York: butchers, carters, peddlers, and homeless men in the Bowery,” states the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

What I wish I knew is the street the painting captures. The slight bend in the sidewalk makes me think of Doyers Street in Chinatown, or another cowpath-turned-road somewhere in Lower Manhattan.

The lonely last days of Gilded Age New York City’s biggest Fifth Avenue mansion

The story of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion begins the same way New York’s other Gilded Age palaces got their start: with a socially prominent family in need of a showpiece of a home.

In 1879, Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt—who had been living in fine style in a home on Fifth Avenue and 32nd Street—”commissioned George B. Post to design their new house on the lot they had purchased on the corner of 57th and Fifth,” states Wayne Craven in his book, Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society.

Cornelius “Corneil” Vanderbilt II was the favorite grandson of railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. He and his wife, Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt had seven children throughout their long and apparently happy marriage.

They also had Corneil’s $70 million inheritance, plus his earnings as president of the New York Central Railroad, to spend on a lavish Fifth Avenue home steps away from Vanderbilt Row. This stretch of Fifth Avenue had been colonized by other Vanderbilts—included William K. and Alva Vanderbilt, who built their “Petit Chateau” on Fifth and 53rd Street.

A decade after Alice (below, in 1880) and Corneil’s mansion was completed in 1883 (second image), the couple embarked on a renovation and expansion—spurred on by competition with Alva Vanderbilt and other Gilded Age movers and shakers who were building more extravagant houses.

Corneil bought and bulldozed several existing homes on the block; Post again was commissioned (with help from architect Richard Morris Hunt) to more than double the size of the original house.

Spanning Fifth Avenue from 57th to 58th Street, the renovated limestone and brick palace (top image) now boasted 137 rooms across six floors, including 37 bedrooms, 16 bathrooms, various salon rooms, a grand dining room that doubled as an art gallery, and a Louis XIV-inspired ballroom, according to The Gilded Age Era blog.

Ornate detailing, stained glass windows, and mosaics by artists like Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John La Farge decorated the interior rooms. The porte-cochere at the entrance contained six sculptured reliefs by Karl Bitter of boys and girls singing. A tall iron fence and gates surrounded the property.

After dropping an estimated $3 million over more than a decade, Corneil and Alice finally had the home they desired—one that earned the title of the largest private residence ever built in New York City. But not long after the expansion was completed in 1894, the beginning of the end commenced.

In September 1899, Corneil, 55, died in his mansion of a cerebral hemorrhage. His health had already been diminished after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1896.

Alice continued living in the house, helped along by a $7 million trust fund her husband left her to help maintain the Fifth Avenue home as well as the couple’s spectacular Newport residence, The Breakers. Beset by grief, she dialed back her social appointments and sequestered inside—along with a staff of over 30 servants.

As the early 20th century continued, the opulence of the Gilded Age began to be viewed as gauche and excessive. Fifth Avenue remained the city’s most impressive address, but the residences just south of Central Park were being replaced by banks and retail stores. (Below, Everett Shinn’s “The Old Vanderbilt House.”)

Architectural styles also changed. Instead of commissioning a mansion that mimicked a chateau or palazzo, many of New York’s rich were migrating to luxury apartment buildings—where they no longer had to manage a staff of servants and pay ever-increasing property taxes.

The cost of maintaining her Fifth Avenue mansion began to hit Alice hard. “The upkeep of the place was a burden on the estate, and its neighborhood encroached upon by business was no longer considered suitable for residential purposes,” wrote the New York Times in 1934.

It didn’t help that the Pulitzer Fountain had gone up right outside her bedroom in 1916, and the naked backside of the female figure gracing the fountain reportedly shocked her. All of these factors contributed to Alice’s leaving her mansion for a more manageable residence at 857 Fifth Avenue owned by her son-in-law.

The Fifth Avenue mansion’s days were now numbered. “The mansion became unused and boarded up, a white elephant amid the commercial establishments that began to encapsulate it,” wrote Craven.

In 1925, Alice “applied to the Supreme Court today for permission to sell the Vanderbilt mansion at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, for $7,100,000 cash,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in August of that year. (Why she had to apply for permission isn’t clear; perhaps it had to do with the legalities of the trust she was left by her husband.)

A year later, the mansion was sold for close to her asking price. “One week before it was scheduled to suffer the fate of the wrecker’s ball, in January 1927, she arranged to have the house opened to the public, charging fifty cents’ admission to raise money for charity,” stated Craven. “The public flocked to see how the highest of High Society had lived during an era that was by then fading.”

During the spring of 1927, New York City’s largest private residence became a demolition site (above photo). In its place one year later rose Bergdorf Goodman. The elegant department store has now occupied this stretch of Fifth Avenue for almost a century—more than twice as long as Corneil and Alice’s mansion stood.

Alice, still living at 857 Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, died in 1934 at age 88. Like her mansion, she outlived the Gilded Age.

[Top image: Alamy; second, third, fourth, and fifth images: Wikipedia; sixth image: Everett Shinn; seventh image: Larry Froeber/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images; eighth image: Bain Collection/LOC]

It’s a working Thanksgiving for this late 19th century streetcar driver

It’s hard to imagine a time when mass transit meant taking a horse-drawn streetcar. But stepping into an unheated, weakly lit car that glided along steel tracks embedded in the street was one way New Yorkers got around in the 19th century.

By 1860, Manhattan had 14 horse-drawn streetcar lines carrying 38 million passengers a year, according to The Wheels That Powered New York. This was in addition to 29 omnibus lines, which arrived in the early 19th century. (An omnibus was similar to a streetcar, but the wheels didn’t align with steel runners in the street—making it a bumpier, more hazardous ride.)

Hundreds of car drivers were employed by the many private streetcar companies that plied the avenues of Manhattan and Brooklyn. These men, clad in caps and overcoats in cold weather, commanded the horses and made the required stops. Meanwhile, a conductor took the fares (5-10 cents) of passengers and helped people board.

Like so many other working New Yorkers, the car driver didn’t have holidays off. (Neither did the policeman clutching the billy club on the right.) But this driver’s Thanksgiving was made a little more bearable by a young girl handing him what looks like a thermos—perhaps filled with hot soup or stew.

[Image: NYPL Digital Collections]

What a Midtown lunch counter’s Thanksgiving menu says about dining in 1917

Looking through vintage Thanksgiving menus from New York restaurants gives us a lot of insight into how city residents used to dine and live.

Case in point: menus from fancy Gilded Age hotel eateries. The titans of industry who spent Turkey Day at the Plaza Hotel in 1899 enjoyed several-course meals of the finest dishes—starting with appetizer courses of little neck clams and turtle soap through entrees like canvasback duck, turkey stuffed with chestnuts, and broiled hothouse chicken. (What is that, exactly?)

More interesting are the Thanksgiving menus from working-class counters and luncheonettes. The New Mills Hotel Restaurant and Lunch Counter, once located smack in the Garment District on Seventh Avenue and 36th Street, is one of these restaurants (menu above).

First, a little backstory about Mills Hotels. Three were built in Manhattan from the 1890s through the early 1900s. They were the brainchild of banker Darius Ogden Mills, who was a millionaire several times over but remained concerned about the plight of men of lesser means who couldn’t always find an affordable and safe place to live in the city at that time.

Mills built his first Mills Hotel on Bleecker Street in 1897, offering clean, comfortable single rooms to men for 20 cents a night, according to a 2011 New York Times article by Christopher Gray. A second Mills Hotel went up Chrystie and Rivington Streets, and the third in 1907 at Seventh Avenue and 36th Street (photo above).

Mills deemed this one for “those injured in life’s battle,” states Gray. The single rooms here, dubbed the New Mills Hotel, cost a little more per night: 30-40 cents, depending on the size of the room.

When the Lunch Counter launched isn’t clear, but this Thanksgiving menu dates to 1917. Open to the public (note the “tables for ladies” line), the offerings are decidedly less illustrious than those of the Plaza Hotel.

But for fifty cents, a diner could fill his or her belly with a Thanksgiving feast of roast stuffed turkey and cranberry sauce, plus English plum pudding with “hard rum” sauce. Sides include sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, and vegetables. The baked apple pie would be my on my plate for dessert.

The non-Thanksgiving menu items seem designed for the type of men who lived in the hotel or in similar situations. Roast suckling pig with applesauce cost 30 cents. Cream of celery soup with bread and butter was ten cents. A cup of hot coffee: a nickel.

The back page of the menu offers insight into dining during wartime. The United States had entered the Great War by now, and the New Mills Hotel Restaurant and Lunch Counter urged customers to observe the call for “meatless Tuesdays and wheatless Wednesdays” to conserve food for soldiers overseas.

“Eat wisely and plenty but without waste: food may win the war” the menu states. It’s hard not to wonder how a similar request would go over with today’s diners.

[Menu: NYPL Buttolph Collection of Menus; second image: MCNY, 1907, X2010.28.578]