Hotel 373

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8-story hotel completed in 1906. Designed by Hunt & Hunt as a showroom and office building, it was originally called the Alvin Building, after the main lessee - the Alvin Manufacturing Company (who were silversmiths). Alvin Manufacturing installed its showrooms in the long retail space on the ground floor. Polished wooden cases glistened with silver flatware, vases and trinkets under the electric illumination of massive hanging fixtures. In the offices above, a variety of tenants moved in, including at least two dentists, Dr. William C. Fischer and Dr. Alison Harlan.

The light grey-painted brick building has one bay on the narrow Fifth Avenue facade, with triple-windows, and five bays along the wider 35th Street side - two widely-spaced end bays with paired windows, and a slightly recessed middle section with three bays of double-windows. These are simply, without ornamentation, except for the stone band courses running along the bases of the windows across the middle section. The paired windows in the end bays are separated by paneled pilasters and have grey-painted spandrels adorned with paired escutcheons. A band course runs across the full 2nd floor.

Hanging festoons decorate the wide piers around the end bays at the 7th floor, below a carved lintel with a bracket and wreath in the middle. At the top floor the paired windows at the end bays are flanked by recessed panels with carvings, and a band course runs all the way across the base of this floor.

On the avenue facade, the three windows at each floor are divided by grey-painted pilasters, and there are triple-spandrels with escutcheons between the 4th-7th floors. The ornament at the 7th & 8th floors is similar to the end bays on the wider south facade. Both facades are crowned by a projecting, grey metal roof cornice with dentils and brackets. A green metal fire escape runs down the east elevation.

Only five years after building its New York headquarters, Alvin Manufacturing moved on. Alvin sublet the retail space to Walpole Brothers in 1911. The new tenant was a London-based manufacturer of high-quality Irish linens. As World War I raged in Europe, the Alvin Building saw various apparel companies move into the upper offices. The building was also the headquarters of the League of Women’s Voters in the last years before 19th Amendment to the Constitution. In the 1930s Walpole Brothers linens was replaced by jewelers Bowman, Foster, Wurzburger, Inc.; which was then replaced by Jackman’s Furriers. Then in 1943 the retail space became home to Sidney Meyer home furnishings, draperies and upholstery fabrics. The store was home in the 1950s and 60s to Pfaff Sewing Machine Company, a West German firm.

By the 1980s, when the National Catalog Network and the American Committee on Italian Migration had their offices here the street level of No. 373 Fifth Avenue had been totally altered. New owners converted the building, in 2007, into a boutique hotel called Hotel 373, updating the west end of the ground floor with a green-tinted glass facade, now occupied by a Starbucks coffee. The hotel has 70 guest rooms.