FORT LOWRY HOTEL
8868 17th Avenue, Bath Beach
OCTOBER 29, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 178

In 1895, Irish-born Joseph Lowry bought the former Bath Beach Athletic Club and built on its bayside site a hotel whose four sprawling buildings inspired the name "fort." Alongside the elegant homes of old families and more modest hotels, the resort earned a dubious reputation as a meeting place for New York's theatrical and horse-racing crowds. In the 1920s, two of its buildings were lost in a series of fires, but the hotel still offered rooms to let when Abbott photographed it in 1936. Situated within a few blocks of Abbott's other Cropsey Avenue sites, Fort Lowry shared their fate and was torn down to make way for the Belt Parkway.

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