Hotel Kensington, Fifth Ave. near Washington Square – Photo by Byron Company (New York, N,Y,) – 1904 -From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New Yorkhttp://collections.mcny.org/Collection/Hotel-Kensington,-Fifth-Ave.-near-Washington-Square.-2F3XC53THVN.html
(Kensington Hotel 1901, formerly Haight House Apartments (French Plan) 1870, formerly New-York Club, formerly Private Residences, Southeast Corner Fifth Avenue and E. Fifteenth Street, NYC)
The Haight Mansion,
(No. 2 ? E. Fifteenth Street) from the early 1850s. was the original corner
part of the Haight House Apartments (1870) of the still fashionable Fifth
Avenue neighborhood just off Union Square. The new apartment buildings offered
services like a hotel to a perhaps reluctant upper crust who saw the new
apartment idea little different than the age old tenements of the poor.
By the
turn of century (1900) the apartment building was a new hotel setup from about 1901 after a fire in the late 1890s at the apartment building setup. The
building I believe got torn down in 1906.
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"Only a year
later, in 1871, the first apartment building with hotel services was opened. It
was an adaptation of an old family home into multi-family dwelling for twenty
families and several bachelors.
The building was situated on the corner of 15thStreet and Fifth Avenue, it was called Haight House and had five floors, four devoted to family apartments and the fifth floor devoted to bachelor apartments. In each floor plant there were five apartments composed by three bedrooms, parlor, living room, kitchen, pantry, bathroom and two bedrooms for the service.
The building was situated on the corner of 15thStreet and Fifth Avenue, it was called Haight House and had five floors, four devoted to family apartments and the fifth floor devoted to bachelor apartments. In each floor plant there were five apartments composed by three bedrooms, parlor, living room, kitchen, pantry, bathroom and two bedrooms for the service.
On the
fifth floor there were eleven bachelor apartments, five of them had a parlor
and two bedrooms, the rest had only a parlor and a bedroom.
A laundry and a kitchen sited in the basement
could serve through a dumbwaiter the different apartments. Meals were served in
the common dining room or in each of the apartments. Pneumatic tubes and electric
bells connected the apartments with the kitchen and the reception of the
building.
After the
construction of the Haight House many similar buildings began to proliferate in
New York. Although most of the examples followed the same pattern, the name
used to designate them used to change depending on its character or its
services. During this first epoch both the used terminology to describe them
and the law that regulated them were of a great ambiguity.
The existing housing
law considered only the word "tenement", which defined a building
that housed three or more families cooking on their premises. Usually the word
"tenement" was associated to low income working class, so new housing
typologies targeted the middle class using other terms to be clearly different
from them, apartment building with hotel services were usually appointed under
the term hotel, family hotel or apartment hotel. During these early years
several examples were built around Fifth Avenue, between 10th and 27th Street…"
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