Grand Hotel
- Architect
- Henry Engelbert
- Year
- 1868
- Style
- Second Empire
- City
- Manhattan, NY
The Grand Hotel rises at the corner of Broadway and West 31st Street, built in 1868 to a design by Henry Engelbert for the carpet manufacturer and merchant Elias S. Higgins. It opened when this stretch of Broadway between Madison and Herald Squares was the city's premier entertainment district, packed with theaters, restaurants, and hotels. Oscar Wilde stayed here at least twice in 1882.
the building
A neighborhood that turned over twice. The hotel opened into the Tenderloin, the racier side-street district that grew up alongside the legitimate theaters. When the theater trade moved further uptown, the area became the Garment District and the Grand Hotel itself slid downmarket into a cut-rate residential hotel.
the style
Engelbert designed the building in the Second Empire style, the mansard-roofed idiom fashionable for hotels and commercial buildings in the years after the Civil War.
More on Second Empirethe architect
Henry Engelbert designed the Grand Hotel for Elias S. Higgins in 1868.
significance
The Grand Hotel was designated a New York City Landmark in 1979 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
nearby
- Martinique New York on Broadway
- Gilsey House
- Hotel Wolcott
- Martinique New York on Broadway, Curio Collection by Hilton
- The Wilbraham
- Marble Collegiate Church