Hotel Alabama

15 East 11th Street | also 13 East 11th Street | Greenwich Village | built 1903

Open on the map5 entries

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1903

    Louis Korn designs the Hotel Alabama for developer Leopold Wertheim, and it opens as an apartment hotel

    In April 1902 Leopold Wertheim purchased the existing structures at Nos. 13 and 15 East 11th Street and engaged architect Louis Korn, who gave the Hotel Alabama a red-brick body above a two-story rusticated limestone base and a Palladio-inspired portico with free-standing Ionic columns. The New-York Tribune reported plans to make it and the Van Rensselaer next door a single hotel, but Korn did not try to match the two designs. It opened in 1903, renting furnished suites with private baths for $25 a week including two meals a day.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1905

    Hotel resident Henry G. Granger is beaten at a Chrystie Street polling place after backing up a poll watcher

    Henry Gregory Granger, a Princeton athlete home from mining and farming ventures in Colombia, lived at the hotel in 1905. He and his brother went with poll watcher Charles O. Brewster to a polling place on Chrystie Street in Tammany's 6th Assembly district, where Brewster had been sandbagged the year before. The New-York Tribune reported on November 9 that Granger was knocked down with a blackjack and kicked unconscious. He told police that State Senator John G. Fitzgerald had instigated the attack.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1906

    March 29

    Widow May Kay shoots at herself in her suite and phones the front desk for help

    May Kay, a young widow with property in New York and Cincinnati and $150,000 in cash, took a suite at the Hotel Alabama in March 1906. The Sun reported that she had threatened suicide, and a doctor had stayed with her until 3 a.m. one night that week to talk her out of it. On the evening of March 29 she telephoned the desk to say she had shot herself, and the clerk called a doctor, the police and an ambulance. She had aimed at her heart but missed, and she told the doctor where she had thrown the revolver.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1908

    January 23

    A Detroit newspaperman and a newly hired maid are tied to a string of hotel burglaries

    James L. Long, a Detroit newspaperman, checked into the Hotel Alabama on January 16, 1908, and spent freely. The next day a young woman, Carrie O'Neill, was hired as a maid; on January 23 a porter saw her leaving Long's room, and Long checked out indignantly while she was dismissed. Two guests who had been at dinner, Mrs. Harold B. Miller and Mrs. M. R. Gibbs, came back to find their rooms ransacked. Police broke into Long's room at the Hotel Breslin, found him with O'Neill and the women's gowns, and believed they had solved a run of hotel thefts.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1970

    February 28

    Provincetown Players founder Ida Rauh dies in her apartment here at 92

    Ida Rauh, born in 1877, died on February 28, 1970, in her apartment in the hotel building. She was a sculptor, poet, painter and actress, a founder of the Provincetown Players nicknamed the "Duse of Macdougal Street," and she directed the first staging of Where the Cross Is Made, a play by Eugene O'Neill. An active supporter of Margaret Sanger's birth-control campaigns, she was arrested in 1916 for handing out pamphlets on the subject.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 518 buildings with stories in Greenwich Village