Useful New York info

[elisabeth]

For anyone needing to pin down exactly where the hotels, theatres etc. featured in Custer's various New York jaunts were located, here's a handy website:

home.comcast.net/~m.chitty/newyorkmap.htm

Its info comes from a little later, the 1880s, but covers a lot of places that hadn't moved since the '60s or '70s, so it's still of value to writers (and the just plain nosy!) here.

For instance, it has the Hotel Brunswick, opposite which GAC and Libbie rented a room in the winter of 1875/6. (It turns out to have been on Madison Square, at 5th Avenue and 25th Street.) They took their meals at the hotel, and wrote home that they could live as cheaply that way as at Fort Lincoln. Interestingly, in the 1880s it was offering its table d'hote at just $1.50, which sounds pretty good; in the depressed 1870s it was probably even cheaper.

Incidentally, some very minor info from elsewhere, of interest only to Keogh fans: since his favourite hotel, the Metropolitan, had burned down before his last trip to Ireland in 1874, those few as obsessed with minutiae as me (if any such exist) might have wondered where he'd have stayed in New York on his way to the ship. Mystery solved, courtesy of the New York Times archive. In the May 18th edition of the paper, he's reported as arriving (on May 17th, presumably) at the Glenham Hotel. This was at 5th Avenue and 22nd Street West, and is now the Albert Building. Apparently the building "once housed the saloon of master mixologist Dr. Jerry Thomas (for whom the Tom and Jerry is named)". So if the said Dr. was active at the time -- which I've yet to check -- I think we could conclude that Keogh was partial to a good cocktail ... since the Metropolitan Hotel was famous for (surprise) the Metropolitan. Quite a sweet notion, Keogh scouring the city for really creative cocktail barmen ...

[Melani]

Wow, Elisabeth, you never cease to amaze me! Don't know what I can talk my family into; we will be seeing the Tenement Museum at my request, but that's of more general interest. And I'm pretty sure Keogh was partial to any sort of good drink!

[Melani]

Today we were at the American Museum of Natural History. In the Plains Indians section, they have a shirt belonging to the Cheyenne warrior White Antelope, who I believe was killed at Sand Creek. That exhibit, and the whole room, had a very sad and unpleasant feel to it.

[elisabeth]

A question. Hoping someone may know the answer to this ...

As mentioned above, in 1875/6 the Custers stayed in a rented room opposite the Hotel Brunswick, but used the hotel for their meals. I'd always kind of assumed that this was because they were more than usually poor at the time. However, in 1871, when Custer writes to Lauffer inviting him to call on him with any evidence he can bring against Merrill, he mentions that he's staying in rooms near the Fifth Avenue Hotel -- not in the hotel itself. (Which makes sense of his "landlady" references in his letters to Libbie at the time.)

I'm beginning to wonder if this was some kind of standard practice, at least for longish stays in a city such as New York: that you'd register with a hotel as a sort of half-guest, using it as your correspondence address and taking advantage of its facilities while actually staying somewhere humbler and cheaper. Is this the case? Does anybody know?