The Astor House

The Astor House hotel—the latest word in modern hotels—opened on Broadway in 1836 in New York; one of its proprietors was Charles Stetson, former head bartender at Boston’s Tremont House. Nonetheless, the hotel went against common practice and displaced the bar from the lobby to a small, secluded room of its own. This was considered a sop to the nascent temperance movement, whose supporters disliked checking into the hotel at the bar as was customary. Liquor sales nonetheless remained high, and in 1845 the bar was moved to larger quarters in the basement. Presiding over the bar was Sherwood “Shed” Sterling (1801–1856), the “Napoleon II” of barkeepers, as one old habitué dubbed him (the original Napoleon being Orsamus Willard), and “an expert maker of fancy drinks and cocktails” who “knew everybody and could name them.” See Willard, Orsamus.

In 1852, the hotel moved the bar again, to the center of a showy new iron and glass rotunda occupying the former central courtyard. After a slow start, the statue-studded and elaborately gilded 50-foot (15-meter) black walnut bar, reputedly the largest in the city, became a mainstay of the downtown cocktail route for the next sixty years. See cocktail route. In the 1880s, the bar took in from $700 to as much as $7,000 a day, depending on the season (and which estimate one believes). At the time, 25 cents was a high price to pay for a drink, and a bar that made $50 a day was considered a smashing success.

The Astor House bar was not an engine for drink innovation—in 1889, for instance, when two Englishmen ordered scotch whisky cocktails, then coming into vogue, the head bartender had never heard of such a thing—but it was a great popularizer of drinks such as the Collins and the Manhattan, adopting them early and selling them in large numbers. See Collins and Manhattan. A great many young bartenders, including Jim Gray, began their careers there, learning their trade from head bartenders such as George Alexander in the 1850s, Billy Flynn in the 1880s, and Edward Buchanan (a grand nephew of President James Buchanan) in the late 1900s and early 1910s. See Gray, “Colonel” Jim. In 1913, after almost eighty years of operation, the bar closed when the badly outdated Astor House was sold for development. The bar, however, was still as busy as it ever was.

“Bar of Old Astor House Recalls Drinkers of Ante-Bellum Days.” New York Press, May 11, 1913, 7.

“Caught at Last.” New-York Herald, August 27, 1836, 2.

“Liquor Drinking in New York.” Decatur (IL) Daily Republican, February 1, 1882.

“New York City: Its Ancient Taverns and Modern Hotels.” The Caterer and Household Magazine, 1885, 311.

By: David Wondrich

The Astor House, New York, as portrayed in Gleason’s Pictorial, 1854. Source: Wondrich Collection.