Saturday, February 1, 2025

Early Hospitality in Lower Manhattan

1842-1894 


New York was already a rapidly growing city by 1800, with its 60,000 residents concentrated in Lower Manhattan. By the close of the century, the population had surged to 3.4 million, distributed across the city’s newly consolidated boroughs. This rapid growth, coupled with increasing business activity, fueled the demand for hotels and restaurants, establishing Lower Manhattan as one of the birthplaces of the American hospitality industry. Sixteen surviving menus from the 19th century, beginning in the early 1840s when menus first came into general use, provide a glimpse into these early establishments and the types of venues that remained as society migrated uptown and the area transitioned into a financial district.

Hotels 
Astor House
Broadway and Vesey Street

Designed by architect Isaiah Rogers to surpass his groundbreaking Tremont House in Boston, Astor House was New York’s first luxury hotel. Opened in 1836 just west of City Hall Park, it was originally named the Park Hotel but was soon renamed after its owner, businessman John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest person in the United States.

Astor House maintained separate dining rooms for men and women, known as the gentlemen’s ordinary and ladies’ ordinary. Like most hotels of the era, it followed the table d’hôte tradition, where guests dined at set meal times. While some dishes on this menu from the gentlemen’s ordinary in 1841 are shown in English, the entrées are in French, mirroring the organization of the kitchen, where French chefs prepared the entrées and English chefs roasted the meats. 



The following menu is from the ladies’ ordinary in 1852. While the women’s dining room was smaller and more ornately furnished, the cuisine was most likely the same as that in the men’s dining room, as there was no prevailing assumption about women’s dining preferences at the time. The side columns contain the wine list featuring nearly fifty varieties of Madeira—an extraordinary selection noted by English novelist Frederick Marryat in his 1840 travelogue, Diary in America.


Franklin House 
197 Broadway 
Meal times were strictly observed at upper-class hotels, where dining was a highly ritualized affair. At the appointed hour, a great gong signaled the opening of the dining room doors, prompting guests to hurriedly take their seats. The headwaiter then struck a bell to begin the service. 

The waitstaff at the Franklin House, which included the porter, bootblack, and other hotel employees spruced up for the occasion, entered with military precision, carrying tureens of soup and the fish course. At the sound of a second bell, the dishes were placed on the tables. A third bell sent the waiters marching back to the kitchen, a choreographed routine repeated multiple times over the course of the meal. The entrées are called “side dishes” on the menu below from December 21, 1844. On this first day of winter, the vegetables included “kole slaugh” (coleslaw), vegetable oysters (salsify), and Carolina potatoes (sweet potatoes).


Howards Hotel 
176 Broadway 
Established in 1840, Howards’ Hotel stood at the corner of Maiden Lane, a bustling shopping street illuminated by gas lamps. It was regarded as a quiet hotel suitable for families. In addition to its permanent residents, the hotel welcomed transient guests, including captains and pursers from the California steamships.

One of its most notable visitors was President John Tyler, who stayed at this hotel the night before his marriage to 24-year-old Julia Gardiner in 1842. To maintain secrecy, the hotel employees were reportedly locked in their rooms to prevent any leaks to the press. The menu below dates from August of that same year.


Around this time, Tunis Campbell was the headwaiter at Howards’ Hotel, a prestigious role akin to what is now known as the maître d'hôtel. In addition to supervising the formal service, Campbell was the sole member of the waitstaff who interacted directly with diners. In 1848, he published a book titled Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters, and Housekeepers Guide, one of the earliest hospitality guides by an African American.


The hotel 
experienced a significant shift in its clientele during the Civil War, when its Southern guests were replaced by military procurement officers.  Union troops could often be observed marching down nearby Cortland Street to the New Jersey ferry, en route to the frontlines. The hotel was one of several establishments targeted in an arson attempt by Confederate agents in November 1864.

New York Hotel 
721 Broadway 
Established in 1844, the New York Hotel was the first hostelry to offer hall baths. Nevertheless, it faced a slow start due to its remote location at Washington Place, over a mile and a half north of the Franklin House and Howards’ Hotel. Another challenge was its adoption of the European plan, in which room and board were charged separately. However, this approach, which offered guests more flexible dining hours, was soon reversed, as shown by this table d’hôte menu from 1849. At the time, Americans still preferred dining communally with strangers, as the table d’hôte was very much a social event. Additionally, set dining hours aligned well with the domestic routines of families, who made up about half of the city’s hotel occupants.


The hotel’s initially remote location ultimately extended its commercial life. The à la carte menu below from 1886 shows that the hotel eventually reverted back to the European plan. By this time, à la carte dining was quickly becoming the norm, reflecting broader social changes, such as the migration of families from hotels to the new apartment buildings called “French flats.”


Western Hotel 
9 Cortlandt Street
Yosemite Valley was first encountered by non-Native Americans in 1851—the same year this table d’hôte menu was in use. Each day, the menu was composed by crossing off the unavailable dishes, and adding the daily specials. The handwritten additions on this example include fried eels and apple fritters. Pork and beans, a regular entrée at middling establishments like the Western Hotel, also appeared on the menus of upper-class hotels, where it was typically reserved for Sunday dinner in accordance with the New England tradition.


Judson’s 
61 Broadway 
Making change was difficult due to the variety of foreign coins in circulation as legal tender until 1857 when the United States had accumulated enough gold and silver to mint a sufficient supply of its own specie. Before that, the standard monetary unit was 12½ cents, reflecting the widespread use of the Spanish real—a silver coin that was cut into pieces to facilitate exchange. This 12½-cent unit went by different names in different regions. In New York, it was called a “shilling,” and half that amount as a “six pence,” borrowing the British abbreviations “s” for shilling and “d” for pence. For example, roast Brandt duck on this 1853 menu costs three shillings and six pence, or 43¾ cents. (In 1853, the waiters at Judson’s were paid $18 per month, a salary they were reportedly grateful to receive.) The prices on the wine list are shown in U. S. dollars and cents.  







Judson’s was one of the city’s main hostelries in the 1840s. However, by 1853, it had been eclipsed by larger, more fashionable hotels like the St. Nicholas and the Metropolitan, which opened twenty-five blocks north on Broadway. Judson’s was destroyed by fire in November 1854.

French’s Hotel 
53-63 Chatham Street (Park Row) 
The early scene shown below depicts French’s Hotel, and the adjacent Tammany Hotel, facing City Hall Park. An 1853 advertisement claimed, “This Establishment is provided with all the conveniences which a traveler can reasonably desire—fine Reading Rooms, Baths, Barber’s Shop, and, above all, each visitor having a room exclusively to himself; also, experienced and prompt attendants who are obedient to every call, and who are well paid for their services by their employer, and never allow themselves to be humiliated by taking a bribe or a bounty from the visitors at the house. In this respect, therefore, French’s Hotel is not on the European plan, nor on the plan of most other Hotels in this country, at which men and women are employed at low wages, in order that their livelihood shall depend on their skill in mendicancy.” 


Chatham Street was officially renamed Park Row in 1886, which is the year of this à la carte menu. Opened in 1849, Frenchhad abandoned the custom of the table d’hôte by this time, but continued to have its dinner menus printed daily. The example below was produced by Borden & Cain, a printer on West Broadway that specialized in daily menus. 





In 1889, publisher Joseph Pulitzer purchased French’s Hotel and demolished it to construct the 18-story New York World Building on the site. When completed, it became the tallest structure in the city, surpassing the height of Trinity Churchs steepleThe presence of major newspaper operations along Park Row earned it the nickname “Newspaper Row.” 


Hotel/Restaurant
S. H. Crook’s
84 Chatham Street (Park Row) 
Small restaurants with a few rentable rooms upstairs also operated as hotels. The à la carte menu below, dating to the late 1870s, includes offerings for breakfast, dinner, and tea (supper). Its cover features a portrait of the proprietor, Samuel Crook, affectionately known as “Old Guv.” The photograph was taken by R. A. Lewis, whose studio was located nearby. The menu itself is an Albertype, a product of a technology that used a gelatin-coated plate made from a photographic negative. This example was created by Edward Bierstadt, a pioneer in photography and the brother of renowned Western artist Albert Bierstadt.






Restaurants 
Welsh’s Eating House 
85 Nassau Street 
In the 1840s, Manhattan was home to numerous oyster saloons and about 125 “eating houses,” fifteen of which were located on Nassau Street in the heart of the Fourth Estate. Accordingly, restaurateur and temperance advocate Alexander “Sandy” Welsh published his menu in the form of a four-page newspaper. The French phrase Vite, Vite, Servez la Tortoise—Quick, quick, serve the tortoise—contained in the masthead, harkens back to a basement eatery named Terrapin Lunch that Welsh previously operated below Scudder’s Museum on Broadway. In 1841, showman P. T. Barnum acquired this museum, which was located only one block from Welsh’s Eating House. In fact, Barnum may have inspired the bombastic style of Welsh’s Times. In this February 1847 edition, Welsh claimed to have chartered a schooner to bring in the first shad of the season, announcing, “Due notice will be given of its arrival, by the issue of an Extra Times, and the firing off of a hundred guns. LOOK OUT FOR THE SHAD!”





Edgar Allan Poe worked at the nearby New York Evening Mirror in the mid-1840s, during which time he composed and published The Raven. Years later, newspapermen recalled that Poe had submitted the stanzas of his epic poem piecemeal for criticism to fellow journalists at Welsh’s Eating House. In 1847–48, Welsh relocated his eatery to 15 Chatham Street, near the Shakespeare House, where it operated briefly before closing.

Shakespeare House
11 Chatham Street (Park Row) 
English-born Edward “Ned” Windust and his wife, Sarah, a trained cook from London, opened Shakespeare House in 1825, the year that marked the opening of the Erie Canal, sparking a surge in trade and commerce. Their restaurant, which was located two doors from the Park Theatre, attracted actors, theatergoers, and journalists. Ned Windust “became something of a literary character, and his Latin motto, Nunquam Non Paratus—Always at the Ready—became a shorthand for the Shakespeare House itself….,” notes David S. Shields in The Culinarians. This menu comes from a lavish banquet honoring Windust in 1850. 



Taylors Saloon
Broadway and Franklin Street 
Taylor’s Saloon was the foremost women’s restaurant in antebellum New York. Originally opened as an ice cream parlor in 1851, it expanded five years later into what Putnam’s Monthly described as “the largest and most elegant restaurant in the world.” The restaurant was richly furnished in the way that retail spaces were then made respectable for women. In 1859, Norton’s Hand Book of New York City reported, “The view from the two grand entrances is gorgeous. The floor is laid with beautiful marble tiles, the counters are of the purest marble; the ceilings are ornamented with bronze and gilt figures, and supported at the corners by kneeling figures of marble; the ceilings are ornamented with the most elaborate scroll work and gildings, the walls are mostly concealed by immense mirrors in rich frames, and the chairs and sofas are covered in rich cloth of crimson and gold.”


Taylor’s occupied the ground floor of the International Hotel. Although men were not allowed in the main dining room unless escorted by a woman, the restaurant maintained a men’s ordinary in the basement. Taylor’s attracted luminaries, such as the poet Walt Whitman who liked to entertain there. It also appeared as an aspirational restaurant in Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories. In the evening, the 1,200-seat restaurant was crowded with theatergoers stopping in before or after the performance. However, the cuisine appears to have been less grand than the glittering surroundings. William Willis, editor of Harper’s Magazine, ranked Taylor’s somewhere “between a fifth-rate Palais Royal restaurant and a second-rate Vienna cream shop.”

This 56-page menu from 1861 features black gutta-percha covers inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The bill of fare is shown on the recto of each page, framed by a chromolithographic border. The volume is organized into nineteen sectionsextra dishes, breakfast, cold meats and relishes, oysters, soups, fish, beef, lamb or mutton, veal, poultry, game, vegetables, eggs and omelets, ice cream, fruit, coffee and chocolate, cordials, wine, and ale. The verso of each leaf contains printed advertisements, some in color, such as the one below for Barnum’s Museum.





In 1866, Taylor’s relocated to the St. Denis Hotel on Broadway at East 11th Street, where it was strategically situated at the base of the fashionable shopping district known as the Ladies’ Mile.

P. M. Ohmeis & Co.
148-150 Fulton Street 
Peter Ohmeis operated his restaurant around the corner from where Welsh’s Eating House had once been located. Turkey with cranberry sauce is one of the 25-cent specials on the menu below from the early 1870s, shortly after the restaurant opened. Fifty years later, the German-born restaurateur summed up his career, remarking, “From roast beef at 25 cents to roast beef at 90 cents.” 


John A. P. Fisk's 
76 Broad Street 
John A. P. Fisk was the son of a restaurateur who owned a chophouse at 24 Broad Street. According to lore, it was stipulated he could enter the family business once he reached his father’s weight of 295 pounds. At the age of thirteen, he weighed 277 pounds, which was deemed close enough. The daguerreotype below was taken when Fisk was 15 years old and weighed 360 pounds. In adulthood, Fisk was the president of the Fat Man’s Club, a whimsical social association that embodied the cultural values of the era, celebrating abundance in all its forms. 


Fisk’s was only a four-minute walk from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Evidence of its affluent clientele is provided by the offering of green turtle soup, a symbol of elitism, priced at 40 cents on this 1889 menu. In addition to fine cuisine, there was also a need for speedy service, especially during business hours. A notation on this menu states, “Our steaks and English mutton chops cooked to order (time, 10 minutes).” 


Harlow & Co. 
76 Broad Street 
William Harlow took over John Fish’s restaurant in 1894, the year this menu was issued. By then, the price of a bowl of green turtle soup had risen to 80 cents—double what it cost just five years earlier—due to the catastrophic decline of the species from overharvesting. Despite this dwindling supply, the menu still offered a takeout option in the margin: a quart of green turtle soup for $1.00, which was roughly equivalent to a factory worker’s daily wage.


A significant omission in this survey is Delmonico’s, which opened at the corner of Beaver and William Streets in 1837 and was universally regarded as America’s greatest restaurant for the remainder of the century. “It is hard to exaggerate Delmonico’s importance. It set a pattern for what fine dining meant… and had many worthy and successful imitators,” writes Paul Freedman in Ten Restaurants That Changed America. During the latter half of the 19th century, the Delmonico family operated as many as four restaurants simultaneously in New York, including their original location in Lower Manhattan. A 12-page menu from 1838 is preserved in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York.

In recent years, Lower Manhattan has undergone a remarkable transformation, evolving from a primarily financial district into a vibrant urban center once again teeming with restaurants and hotels.






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