Mills House No. 1

Mills House No. 1 or the Mills Hotel at 160 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City was built as a hotel for poor men. It was funded by banker Darius Ogden Mills and designed by Ernest Flagg and opened in 1897. The building is now The Atrium.

Detail of Mills House No. 1, now The Atrium

Description

Mills House No. 1 is one of two survivors of three men's hotels built by banker Darius Ogden Mills in New York City. It originally contained 1,554 tiny rooms (7 and a half by 6 feet or 5 by 8 feet) that rented at the affordable rate of 20 cents a night, with meals costing 15 cents,[1][2] The rooms contained only a bed with a mattress and two pillows, one stuffed with hair, the other with feathers, a chair and a clothes rack, and their walls stopped about a foot short of the ceiling. There were four toilets and six washbasins on each floor (for 162 rooms) and bathrooms on the ground floor.[3]

The building extends along Bleecker Street from Sullivan to Thompson streets, occupying four city lots.[3] It was constructed on the site of a row of formerly fashionable houses called Depauw Row, which had become tenements.[1] It cost $1.25 million to build and has eleven stories; two 100-foot (30 m) air shafts or light wells, 50 feet (15 m) square, capped by skylights, enabled each room to have a window[3] and correspond to the provisions of the 1879 Tenement House Law known as the "Old Law"; the architect, Ernest Flagg, was an advocate for housing reform who had urged these requirements. The layout of the building may have been inspired by the layout of The Dakota (1884), or by apartment buildings he had seen in Paris.

Similar buildings

It was the prototype of the philanthropic hotel movement, although Mills emphasized that his hotels were run efficiently so as to make a modest profit for investors[4][5] and "[not to offend] the pride or praiseworthy independence of those I serve."[3] It had its grand opening on November 1, 1897, the same day as the Astoria Hotel;[6] Mills House No. 2, with 600 similar rooms, opened a few months later on Rivington Street at Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side. Mills House No. 3, which opened in 1907 with somewhat larger rooms and somewhat higher prices,[2][7] still stands at 485 Seventh Avenue, at the northeast corner of 36th Street.

Mills House No. 1 in 1905

Mills said he was inspired by the Rowton Houses in London, but wanted to improve on them by providing something less like a lodging house.[2] Mills House hotels were closed during the day to encourage residents to seek work. Guests could not gain entry after midnight and were required to pay in advance; they were refused entry, even if they had prepaid, if they were drunk. Amenities included a library,[1] and guests could also use a network of lounges.[3] In 1902, Jacob A. Riis included the Mills Houses in his book The Battle with the Slum.[8]

Operation and use

Mills House No. 1 was operated by a family trust after Mills' death until 1949, when it was sold and became the Greenwich Hotel;[9] it remained for men only.[10] By the 1960s, it became the first hotel in New York to be called a "welfare hotel".[5] Some remembered it as "a mean flop house [where] winos and junkies could get a room ... for $2 a night"[11][12] and where someone was once killed by a table that had been thrown out of a window.[13] The jazz club The Village Gate operated from 1958 to 1994 in the former laundry in the basement of the building and later also on upper floors.[14]

The Atrium in 2006

In the early 1960s, the building was to have been converted into artists' and students' housing with theatre facilities under the name Renaissance House.[15][16]

In the mid-1970s, the building was gut-renovated and converted into an apartment house, named The Atrium for the covered courtyards.[17] In the 1980s, the apartments were converted to a housing cooperative;[3] in the mid-1990s, the exterior was renovated.[18] There are 194 apartments, and some furnished suites available for short-term rental. The Village Gate space became a CVS Pharmacy with (Le) Poisson Rouge located below.

Mills House No. 1 was planned to be designated as a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1967, but the owner's lawyer objected.[3]

References
  1. "In the Mills Hotel: Where Workingmen May Live Cheaply and Well". The Meriden Weekly Republican. Meriden, Connecticut. Philadelphia Times. December 15, 1898. p. 5.
  2. "The Mills Hotels: A Charity That Helped Men to Help Themselves". The Lewiston Daily Sun. Lewiston, Maine. New York Post. January 8, 1910. p. 8.
  3. Gray, Christopher (November 6, 1994). "Streetscapes/Mills House No. 1 on Bleecker Street; A Clean, Airy 1897 Home for 1,560 Working Men". The New York Times.
  4. DePastino, Todd (2003). Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press. pp. 135–37. ISBN 9780226143781.
  5. Groth, Paul Erling (1994). Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. Berkeley: University of California. pp. 149–50. ISBN 9780520068766.
  6. "Two Unique Hotels: Tips You Give in One Would Provide Comforts in the Other". The Morning Record. Meriden, Connecticut. October 27, 1897. p. 6.
  7. "A New Mills Hotel". Boston Evening Transcript. New York Tribune. November 25, 1905. p. B11.
  8. Riis, Jacob A. (1902). VI. The Mills Houses. ISBN 9780512007889. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  9. "Old Menu Offers Steak for a Dime". The Village Voice. November 23, 1955. p. 2.
  10. "Planning Board Calls for End to Old Mills Hotel". The Village Voice. June 27, 1956. p. 3.
  11. Kennedy, Mark (April 25, 2003). "'Papa' comes back: Denny Doherty talks about the old days". The Freelance-Star. Fredericksburg, Virginia. Associated Press. p. D3.
  12. See also "Bleecker Street—Distillate Of A City". St. Petersburg Times. St. Petersburg, Florida. The New York Times. October 10, 1968. pp. 1A, 20A. the Greenwich Hotel, where for $1.99 a night male winos and welfare cases and a few hippies, too, can get a 4 by 6 foot room with a bed.; Breasted, Mary (July 30, 1970). "The Ghetto Moves Into The Village". The Village Voice. pp. 1, 21–22. Before Miss Crimmins, the St. Vincent's doctors, and a special unit of social workers went into the Greenwich Hotel, there were an average of 17 robberies a day in the place.
  13. Handman, Herbert I. (January 19, 1976). "Giving Them the Gate". The Village Voice (Letter to the editor). p. 6.
  14. Fox, Margalit (November 6, 2009). "Art D'Lugoff, Village Gate Impresario, Dies at 85". The New York Times. p. A22.
  15. "Mr. Mills' Hotel: Artists' Renaissance to Replace Poor Man's Palace". The Village Voice. December 28, 1961. p. 1.
  16. "VID Sponsors Art Auction". The Village Voice. May 3, 1962. p. 8.
  17. Greenhouse, Steven (September 28, 1975). "Down-at-Heels Hotel in 'Village' Acquiring a Natty New Identity". The New York Times.
  18. Lambert, Bruce (January 9, 1994). "Neighborhood Report: Greenwich Village; Residents' Hope: What Goes Up Must Come Down". The New York Times.

Further reading

40.7284°N 74.0002°W / 40.7284; -74.0002

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