Grand Central Hotel ca. 1870 On August 3rd in 1973, what was once one of the largest and most elegant hotels in the country collapsed onto Broadway, killing four and injuring many. The eight-story, 400-room Grand Central Hotel opened in 1870 and was built in the Second Empire style by architect Henry Engelbert for carpet manufacturer Elias S. Higgins. Located at 667-77 Broadway (near Bond Street, south of West 3rd Street), it was one of the largest hotels in the United States when it was built and was lavishly furnished. In the late 19th century, the hotel with its restaurants and grand spaces became a hub of New York society. As the 20th century progressed, the hotel’s name was changed to the Broadway Central, and its luster faded. By the 1960s and after changes in ownership, the building came to be used as a welfare hotel. Complaints from residents and neighbors about crime, drug use, and prostitution in the building, as well as deteriorating and unhygienic conditions, spurred the State to investigate and penalize the owners. Re-branded as The University Hotel by the early 1970s, the hotel attempted to salvage its image. But by the summer of 1973 bigger problems than image would reveal themselves. Residents reported to the City that cracks had formed throughout the hotel and several structural walls had begun bowing outward. Years of neglect and un-reported interior renovation work had taken its toll on the hundred year old structure. Early on August 3rd, hotel patrons began hearing what they described as “’bongs,’ ‘tings,’ and ‘groans,’ and other noises,” and seeing falling plasterwork throughout the building. By the late afternoon most of the over 300 hotel guests had evacuated, when at about 5:10 P.M. a huge section of the building abruptly collapsed, spilling a huge pile of rubble down on to Broadway. As firemen sifted through the rubble – more than twenty feet high in some places — four bodies were found. The remaining sections of the hotel were demolished and removed. Also lost on the Mercer Street side of the building were six popular off-Broadway theaters that composed the Mercer Arts center. Mercer Arts Center is featured on the HBO show Vinyl. The live theaters on the Mercer Street side were run by Sy and Cynthia Kaback. It was Steina and Woody Vasulka who rented the kitchen of the Center for shows starting on June 15, 1971 before moving to Wooster and Broome streets and finally locating The Kitchen to 512 West 19th Street, where it still is today. Housing for NYU Law School students was eventually built on the site and remains today.

“If you’ve never heard of Pfaff’s saloon, or its coterie of Bohemian artists, that’s not surprising. More than 150 years have elapsed since this scene’s heyday, and time moves in mysterious — sometimes heedless — ways. History is not a meritocracy... To be precise, Pfaff’s (pronounced fafs) was beneath where the shoe store is now. It was an underground saloon in every sense of the word. There’s still a hatchway in the Broadway sidewalk, just as there was in the nineteenth century. It provides entry into the store’s basement, a long, narrow space, lit by electric bulbs and piled high with boxes of shoes. During the 1850s, it was dim, gaslit, and packed with artists. Pfaff’s saloon was the site of an incredibly important cultural movement, the meeting place of America’s first Bohemians. Their leader, Henry Clapp Jr., was editor of the hugely influential Saturday Press. Clapp deserves credit as the person who brought Bohemianism to America, both the word and the way of life. He was joined by a struggling experimental poet, well into middle age, yet still living at home in Brooklyn with his mother, Walt Whitman.” For more on Pfaff's, check out this exclusive by Justin Martin in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.

A tour of the architectural and cultural gems of Bleecker Street. From Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas, from Federal style rowhouses to new law tenements, Bleecker Street represents a wonderful cross-section of New York City’s diverse history.

659 Broadway, ca. 1980. No. 657-659 was built in the late 1860s, to designs by architect Griffith Thomas. Like other buildings along this stretch of Broadway — many of which are also attributed to Thomas — No. 657-659's large block-through lofts were used by manufacturing companies, before conversion to residential in the latter 20th century. While a fire in February 1979 caused extensive damage to Nos. 643-655 to the south, this building was relatively unscathed.

West side of Broadway from Bleecker Street to Bond Street. (No. 647 is the second building from the left), date unknown. The building at no. 647 was originally the Coleman House Hotel. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the vault of the basement housed a Rathskeller-like beer and wine cellar restaurant called Pfaff’s; it was a favorite haunt of the bohemian literary set, including Henry Clapp, Jr (editor of the Saturday Press and "King of Bohemia") and Walt Whitman. It was known as a place where men could meet other men, and it was open to women at a time when the sexes did not meet in such public company. The saloon closed in this location in 1864 though it would move to various other buildings though much of the rest of the 19th century. This building's later tenants included a hat shop and an envelope factory. Today the original building still stands with a shoe store in the first floor retail space and a newly opened cellar bar that takes inspiration from its 19th century predecessor.

77 Bleecker Street, ca. 1975.