32. The Hotel Stands Empty

After its closing in 1882, the Middlesex Hotel building stood empty on Monument Square for eighteen years, attracting “tramps and other vermin,” to quote from John Shepard Keyes’s reminiscences about the place in 1900, when it was under demolition (see no. 42). If there was any notion when it closed that it might open again at some later time, that idea faded away as the building fell into disrepair and became a safety hazard.

By the mid- to late 1890s, the condition of the building grew considerably more derelict than it appears in this view down Lexington Road, which suggests that this photograph was taken not much beyond 1890.

The three-tiered fountain with cast-iron basin (near the flagpole) was placed in Monument Square in 1875, removed in 1906.