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BREVOORT
HOTEL WITH MARK TWAIN HOUSE Brevoort Hotel, variant
image The Brevoort was one of New York's oldest and most famous hotels, best known in Abbott's day for its basement cafe. Fashioned out of three adjoining houses and named for the first Dutch owner of the property, Brevoort House rose to fame in the 1860s as a stopping place for titled Europeans. In 1902, it was renovated by its new owner, Raymond Orteig, a French-born maitre d' who had learned his trade at the nearby Lafayette Hotel . The Brevoort Cafe's French character, enriched by Orteig's yearly wine-buying trips, attracted an illustrious crowd of Greenwich Village artists and writers. Orteig rose to national fame in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh earned the $25,000 that Orteig had offered to the first person to fly across the Atlantic. Prohibition and the depression, however, left the Brevoort limping, and Orteig sold the hotel in 1932. The Gothic Revival town house at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and East 9th Street was home to Mark Twain between 1904 and 1908; his tenure was short, but Twain was then at the height of his celebrity, and his association with the house was highly publicized. The house was built in 1840 by James Renwick, the architect of the nearby Grace Church (1845) and St. Patrick's Cathedral (1878-88). Abbott rejected a close-up view of the Brevoort's main entrance, festooned with the flags of the United States and France, for a view of the entire Fifth Avenue block. South of the Brevoort (right) is One Fifth Avenue, a 1929 Art Deco apartment house; towering over the town houses of Washington Square, it became an instant Village landmark. In 1954 the entire block, including the hotel and the Mark Twain house, was razed for the 19-story Brevoort Apartments, large enough to dwarf One Fifth Avenue. Return to Greenwich Village |
