Hotel 17

225 East 17th Street | also 223 East 17th Street | Gramercy | built 1883

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

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

1883
Thomas Osborne builds the St. George apartment house
Developer Thomas Osborne, who was also the builder and architect and owned the stoneworks that supplied the ornament, demolished two houses at 223 and 225 East 17th Street for an apartment house he named the St. George, after the church across the square. The Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide announced the project on November 11, 1882, and the building was finished about ten months after construction began, in 1883. It stood seven stories at the front and eight at the rear, with two eight-room apartments on each floor served by a passenger elevator.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1884
April 7
A fire at the St. George prompts the FDNY's first scaling-ladder rescue
Osborne sold the new apartment house to investor William R. H. Martin on October 6, 1883, for $200,000. On the morning of April 7, 1884, a fire nearly destroyed the building and caused more than $160,000 in damage. The rescue that followed was the New York City Fire Department's first operation using a scaling ladder.
Source: Wikipedia
1993
Hotel 17 appears in Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery
By the 1930s the St. George's apartments had been converted to furnished rooms, and the building later became the single-room-occupancy Hotel 17. It appears in Woody Allen's 1993 film Manhattan Murder Mystery and has been a location for photo shoots involving David Bowie and Madonna's book Sex.
Source: Wikipedia

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