I stood recently lookin’ at the Potter buildin’ goin’ up at Beekman street and Printin’ House Square, and then I looked at the gorgeous Kelly buildin’ nearly opposite, and then I thought how wonderfully different this whole neighborhood looked thirty years ago, when the swell Clinton Hotel stood near the corner of Beekman and Nassau streets, where the Kelly buildin’ now is.
The Clinton Hotel was built by a prominent New Yorker, already alluded to in these reminiscences as one of the boss mayors of New York–Phillip Hone. Hone began life as a biscuit baker on a small scale, and ended it as a merchant on a big scale, but he was always from first to last a first-class fellow. He was always liberal to the poor. In hard times he fed a multitude of men and women who, but for him, would not have known the taste of bread. Then he took to politics, and of course was deservedly popular with the masses. His money also made him popular with the politicians; so he pleased all classes.
He belonged to the Tammany Society and got to be a grand sachem in that ancient organization. He started out as a Jackson Democrat, but when Jackson went against Nicholas Biddle and the United States Bank, Hone, who tried to keep on the right side of capital as much as he could, went for Biddle’s side, and at last wound up as a Henry Clay Whig.
Hone had a big faith in real estate in the city, and one of his first operations was to build the Clinton Hotel. It was a good deal smaller than the Astor House, which was then the only crack hotel of the metropolis, but it was very cozy and elegant, and from the very first it got to be regarded as a high-toned and exclusive establishment, as far as its charges were concerned. Hone found no difficulty in findin’ a lessee for his hotel, and it opened well. But in the very next year the cholera swept the city and not only swept away all patronage from the hotel, but killed its lessee. Then a man named Bispham took hold of the hotel and did prosperously for a while. But another attack of the cholera swept him away. Then a third lessee was swept away by disease, and people got to be superstitious about the place and regarded it as unlucky.
But a Yankee broke the bad luck of the house and turned it into good. His name was Preston Hodges. He came from Providence, and trusted in Providence and himself. That kind of man always gets along.
Hodges was shrewd enough to get the lease of the house at a very low figure and for a term of years, then he sailed in to win–and won.
He hit New York durin’ the flush times precedin’ the first big panic. There never has been such a carnival of speculation as those times presented, before or since–in comparison, that is, to the total volume of trade and money in the country. But the largest operations in the money market then would be only moderate affairs now. Still the whole value of the stocks and property in the country was not much more than a tenth of the same stock values and property interest to-day. So that relatively speakin’ stock gamblin’ raged more fiercely then than durin’ the Civil War, in the city of New York.
Men, women, and even children gambled in stocks; all sorts of visionary and dishonest schemes were set afloat, and found plenty of fools. It was an era of “inflation” and Hodges and the Clinton Hotel reaped the full benefit. All the leading stock gamblers got to congregatin’ round the Clinton Hotel in the evenin’ just as they did in the Fifth Avenue Hotel twenty years later, and all the monied sharpers, all the flush men of the period, took their meals, or had their rooms, or drank their wine at the Clinton–in fact the bar at the old Clinton got to be looked upon as the highest tones barroom in the city, and all the swells and men of fashion took their mornin’ bracers and their night-caps there.
The wines, too, of the Clinton Hotel were famous. Old rounders are still ready to swear by all that is drinkable that there are no such wines to be had in New York to-day for love or money.
They certainly cost a good deal money. Hodges’s cheapest wine was two dollars a bottle, and from that the price ranged up to twenty dollars. There was more twenty dollar wine than there was two dollar, and more customers for it.
The cellar of the Clinton could boast of some of the finest and oldest wines in Europe–wines really fit for a king. No wonder, then, that the patrons of the Clinton lived like lords. One old fellow, whose real name was Wilson (said to be one of the ancestral relatives of young Orme Wilson, who recently married Miss Astor), boarded at the Clinton for eight years, and was known far and wide under the nickname of “the happy man.” There are exceptions to all rules, and this old man Wilson seems to have been the one exception to the rule that there is no perfect happiness here below that I ever heard of. This “happy man” seemed to be and said he was perfectly happy. His health was excellent, he had never had an ache or pain since childhood, and couldn’t remember those. He was well-to-do, able to do and have everythin’ he wanted, but not rich enough to make it an object to swindle him or kill him, or to have his death eagerly watched for by host of fawnin’ relatives. He had no near relatives. His wife, who had lived very happily with him, had been dead for twenty years; he had never cared or bothered about any other woman. He had two children, a son and a daughter, but both of ‘em were married and settled and entirely independent of him, though very much attached to him and he to ‘em, and he had never had a mother-in-law.
He was fond of sportin’ and wines, yet he never went too far in his bets and never went too deep in his drinkin’; was very social and had plenty of congenial company at the old Clinton; could tell a good story and would let others tell their good stories too; slept well, had a capital digestion, had a fair character and a pretty clear conscience; went to the old Brick Church on Sundays regularly in the mornin’, but wasn’t a bit bigoted; kept his mind actively employed with somethin’ or other all the time, but never overdid anythin’ in this or any other direction.
And finally havin’ lived without any pain, he died without any; he went off suddenly with apoplexy after a hearty dinner, just as he was fallin’ into his usual after dinner nap. Take him for all in all, I guess this old Wilson was about the real sole and and only original “happy man” in New York, and the possession of such a curiosity was in itself enough to immortalize the old Clinton.
Having cleared over two hundred thousand dollars off his hotel and wines in about five years, Hodges sold out his lease of the hotel to the Lelands, then beginnin’ their hotel career. George and Lewis, of the Sturtevant House, bein’ then mere boys.
The Lelands ran the establishment awhile to fair business, and then cultivatin’ the good graces of A. T. Stewart got hold of the Metropolitan Hotel, which, under “Sim Leland, the magnificent” was the finest hotel in the United States.
Miller, a returned Californian and old ‘49er, then got hold of the Clinton and wound it up. After a series of negotiations the directors of the Park Bank erected their buildin’ on the site of the old Clinton, which forever disappeared from public view and memory.
In its time the Clinton was considered the “best located hotel” in the city. “Handy to everything’,” as old Hodges used to say of it. This was very true. It stood almost an equal distance from the old Brick Church and the old Park Theatre. The banks were all around it, and the Tract Society right opposite to it, with Theatre alley and it’s sportin’ resorts convenient.
It was “a fast hotel” all the time, the resort of “the bloods,” and ninety per cent of its patrons probably wound up sooner or later in the poorhouse or the hospital. But it was a jolly place while it lasted, if that is all.
