Christmas, 1881
In 1874, half of all hotel residents in New York City were boarders; houses were simply too expensive for most people. However, it was at about this time that a new idea arrived from Paris called the “French flat” and it began to solve the housing problem. After the first one was built on Eighteenth Street, apartment buildings (as they came to be called) began popping up all over the city, especially on the outskirts of town above Forty-second Street.
“By 1881 the hotels had lost most of their permanent residents,” recount Michael and Ariane Batterberry in their book On the Town in New York. “Hotels still tried to retain something of a family atmosphere, and put themselves out, particularly during the holiday season, to center the activity of the city within their walls. Christmas dinners were sumptuous, and featured menu cards ingenious and marvelous to behold.”1
A case in point is the 1881 Christmas menu shown below from the St. Nicholas Hotel, an opulent and richly ornamented establishment whose white marble façade dominated the west side of Broadway, between Broome and Spring Streets. Crafted by the society stationer Dempsey & Carroll, this menu features a blue silk backing imprinted with views of the St. Nicholas and the American Hotel, an affiliated summer resort in Richfield Springs, New York. On the other side, the bill of fare is presented on a large card in gold lettering; the heading employs a fancy style of typeface called “artistic printing.” This holiday menu includes festive dishes like roast wild turkey, Christmas prize beef, and potatoes à la Santa Claus.
Note
1. Michael and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York, 1973.
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