St. Denis Hotel Building

 office building, historical layer / disappeared object

6-story office building originally completed in 1853 as a hotel. Designed by James Renwick, who also designed the Grace Church directly across the street, the St. Denis Hotel had a storied history. Among its guests were Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, P.T. Barnum, Colonel William “Buffalo Bill “Cody, Abraham Lincoln, and Chester A. Arthur. Here Alexander Graham Bell gave his first New York demonstration of the new telephone in 1877. In 1891 the hotel was enlarged and renovated, and was the again renovated in 1912. The owners, however, filed for bankruptcy a year later, as the northward movement of the entertainment and shopping districts was hurting business.

In 1920, the St. Denis was sold at auction, to a syndicate that announced plans to demolish it for an office building. Instead, however, the group renovated the St. Denis, stripping off Renwick’s decorative terra-cotta window treatments and other Renaissance ornament, and leaving a bland, flat-surfaced cube. The grand dining rooms and reception areas were demolished for non-descript offices. It is still in use as offices today, with tenants of the building largely consist of wellness, fitness, alternative medicine, and psychotherapy businesses.

The north facade is 21 bays wide, with six bays at the original portion of the Broadway facade, plus the southern addition of four bays of joined windows. The facade is painted a pale salmon color, with a horizontal white stripe between the 3rd & 4th floors, and vertical stripes every few bays breaking up the mass of the facade. The main entrance is at the center of the north elevation, with a canvas canopy extending out over the sidewalk, and the bay above having double-windows (the only such bay). The eastern half of this elevation's ground floor has round-arched openings and rustication; the rest of the ground floor is filled by storefronts. Both facades are topped by a projecting brown metal roof cornice.

The ground floor is occupied by The Bag House luggage, The World of Ed Heck Gallery & Shop, Far Eastern Antiques and Art, Glen Dooley Antiques, and The YinOva Center. Demolition permits were filed in 2018 for replacement with a glass office tower.

www.jstor.org/stable/25586238