I was walking across 54th Street yesterday, stopped at 205, snapped a photo, and recalled a friend of mine had once moved into an apartment here some twenty years ago. I recall he was paying 1100.00/month. I recall recoiling at the price. Today 1100.00/month would be a steal. Especially as I know a bit more about the building.
Opened in 1902 as the Hotel Harding at a cost of over half a million dollars (over $20 million today), 205 West 54th Street was the most expensive hotel built in midtown at the time. Its two-story base of rusticated Indiana limestone rose around a monumental entrance of four pilasters topped with a Juliet balcony and an arcade of Romanesque windows, a centerpiece that echoed itself up the red brick and limestone trimmed facade. The ninth story was topped with a deep heavily articulated cornice and the tenth and eleventh were set in a mansard, the eleventh boasting eight richly dormered oversized windows.
I do not write from history. Its facade is perfectly preserved.
Like most of its contemporaries, it was both a transient and residential property. And its unique position on Planet Earth was perhaps partly responsible for the equally unique cast of characters who called it home.
Oweny Madden grew up nearby in the worst of the Irish slums of Hell’s Kitchen. He ran with a gang called The Gophers and was not afraid of a fight. In and out of prison most of his young life, he was released from Sing Sing in 1923 just as Prohibition was in as full a swing as Swing.
His buddy Larry Fay was running a speakeasy out of the basement of the Harding called Club Intime. Larry needed some muscle to keep the likes of tougher gangsters, particularly Dutch Schultz, at bay. Oweny, the man not afraid to use a fist, a pistol, a Tommy gun, or a bomb, was his man. In a secret distillery on 26th Street, Oweny brewed a bathtub beer he named for himself and Madden’s was the gold standard of the Jazz Age. Oweny Madden was the real life Gatsby. And soon, the Intime was the most popular speakeasy in a city full of them, perfectly situated as it was in a basement of a beautiful building between the kitchen called Hell and a glittering district of Theatre.
Installed at the door was one Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan. Born in Waco, her place of birth and larger than life demeanor earned her the honorific for which she was mostly known: Texas. Texas Guinan. Texas had been a silent film star, a producer, a working gal, if you will, and graduated to, let’s say, an entrepreneur. So oily was she from the law she survived dozens and dozens of attempts to shut her speakeasy down, and so snappy was she with a quip, she was an inspiration for perhaps my favorite fictional New Yorker, one Bugs Bunny. When Texas walked into a room you knew it. You heard her. You heard her yell her trademark greeting: Hello Suckers!
Texas and Oweny sat on thrones over a kingdom of Broadway stars, major politicians, distinguished authors, Gilded Age scions, rum runners, punks, and thugs. The two were meant for each other. And deserved each other. They drove one another crazy. It was amour fou, fever love, and had they not other outlets for their rage, like the murder of Dutch Schultz, IN the Intime, they might have killed each other.
Living upstairs at the time was another pistol with a lip, one Mary Jane West. You know her as Mae. Texas and Mae were birds of a feather and of course Oweny fell for her dubious charms as well. Out of love he produced her Broadway play and out of love they fell, both landing in the clink for its dubious title and subject: Sex.
Mae then fell and fell hard for Oweny’s bag man, a smooth talking hoofer with a head of slicked back black hair, one George Ranft. Until he was known as George Raft.
All of them would head up to Texas’ rooms for a string of seances, attended as well by Vanderbilts, a Whitney or two, Norma Shearer. Drunk on Madden beer, they’d chat with another black haired and slicked back screen idol, dearly departed as he was, one Rudolph Valentino.
The Great Depression was depressing and all this jazzy fun would finally come to an end. Harassed to no end at the Harding, Oweny and Texas took their ball and went to Harlem to run the Cotton Club and promote boxing on the side, the glittering stars followed the sun to Hollywood, and the Harding’s fortunes fell with the city’s in the dark last quarter of the 20th Century.
But no fortunes last, even poor ones.
Today the Albamarle, as it has been rechristened, never looked better. And a smallish one bedroom apartment is presently on the market for $620K.
And I think it would go for a lot more if potential buyers had but a shadow of a whisper of a clue as to the fast-talking glittering glowing brawling biting bombed and bombing ghosts roaming its halls and waiting for the next scheduled seance to air their century-old grievances.
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