1887 Photo of the Park Avenue Hotel, located on 4th Avenue (which became Park Avenue) between 32nd and 33rd Street

New York, 1887. Photo measures 16.5 in height, and 21 cm across. The photo was clearly taken on street level, diagonally across from the front entrance. Fourth Avenue is a lot of the foreground. This stretch of Fourth Avenue is today known as Park Avenue South. The avenue and its intersecting streets are are cobblestone. There are a few pedestrians in view, women with open parasols, men, suited, everyone going about their business on a summer day. These pedestrians aren't posed, and they aren't the focal point, or the point, of the photo, but they do give us a sense of street life then. Note that the women are unchaperoned, navigating the cobblestone (truncated) without much ado. Ah, but then one might notice that in lieu of a painted crosswalk, not something not probably conceived before the advent of the automobile, there are what look like stone slabs with flatter surfaces, which made fording the avenue less trying. Also there are a few horse-drawn carriages and two omnibuses, also propelled with genuine horse-power. The transportation easily places this photo pre-automobile. Maybe the most conspicuous thing is the lack of traffic at an hour that the sun would have been fairly high in the sky since shadows are minimal. Yet another point of interest is the clapboard building to the left, with a sign in German. There are few clapboard sided buildings in the city that survive, but at the time, it was ubiquitous, as was German signage. The Park Avenue Hotel was built as a charitable venture to house single women by department store magnate A. T. Stewart. After a long gestation period during which Stewart passed away, "The Women's Hotel" finally opened in 1878. But within two months, Stewart's widow declared the project a failure, as the hotel was bleeding money, and so she had it closed and redesigned to be a more conventional commercial hotel. It re-opened in 1881 as the Park Avenue Hotel. The hotel survived a calamitous fire in 1902 but finally succumbed to "progress" in the mid-1920s when it closed to make way for an office building. Our dating is based on a penciled note on the back of the photo, and given the secondary details, no reason to question it. The photo is on thin paper which rolls up at its corners presently, without a backing material to stabilize it in this regard. The edges of the photo are browned, and there are a few shallow closed tears and chips. The top and to a lesser extent the sides of the photo are blemished from paste seeping through the paper when the photo was mounted in the past. (Inventory #: 008131)