French Hotel

235 Sullivan Street | Greenwich Village | built 1886

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1886

    March 12

    Police surgeon Dr. John H. Dorn files plans for a five-story Queen Anne tenement and store

    Dr. John H. Dorn, a police surgeon whom an inspector calls highly respectable, files plans on March 12 for a five-story brick, stone and terra-cotta tenement and store costing $10,000. The 20-foot-wide building rises in a district reformers condemned as a slum. Its Queen Anne details include terra-cotta fans and fish-scale pier bases, while an elaborate cast-metal parapet announces the date of construction.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1892

    January 12

    Police raid the French Hotel and its Black and Tan saloon, arresting its owner and 45 others

    Above a ground-floor saloon called the Black and Tan, the French Hotel is run as a brothel and flop-house by August Guidon. After years of looking away, police raid it and arrest Guidon with 32 men and 13 women. He is held on $1,000 bail, the others are fined $10 or sent to Blackwell's Island for six months, and newspapers report it and four other dives closed for good.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1930

    A Manhattan mafia guide places a young Carmine Galante at this address in the 1930s

    According to Eric Ferrara's Manhattan Mafia Guide, as cited by Daytonian in Manhattan, the future Bonanno family boss Carmine Galante lived at No. 235 as a young man in the 1930s. He was listed as a sorter at the Fulton Fish Market and had already been arrested in connection with the murder of Police Officer Walter De Castilla.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1996

    Police raid Second Coming Records, the collectors' record shop on the ground floor

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    Second Coming Records moves into the ground-floor space in the 1980s and becomes a destination for collectors, known as a mecca for rare LPs and bootleg recordings of concerts. Police raid the store in 1996, which the New York Times reports in July, and the shop closes shortly afterward.

    “Second Coming Records, a well known record-collecting "mecca," which opened here in the 1980s. The store closed shortly following a 1996 raid by police.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Further reading

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