Hotel St. George -- Brooklyn History
Photo: St. George Tower addition: 111Hicksstreet.com

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, and Part 7 of this story.

Welcome back to the St. George. The old hotel still has many stories to tell. In 1922, the Tumbridge family, the sons of Captain William Tumbridge, the original owner and founder, sold the famous hotel to the real estate development firm of Bing & Bing.

The Tumbridge years were officially over. William Tumbridge had presided over his hotel’s beginnings, in 1886, from one building, to a sprawling group of buildings that took up most of the block bordered by Henry, Clark, Hicks and Pineapple Streets, in Brooklyn Heights.

During those thirty-six years, much had happened in the hotel, good and bad; there were weddings, business meetings, summer stays, and secret trysts. Guests had stayed for years, and others were tossed out personally by Captain Tumbridge for non-payment. There were fistfights, accidental deaths, and at least two suicides. There were walkouts, strikes, and anti-suffragette meetings. You name it, the St. George had seen it, and much more was to come.

Brothers Leo and Alexander Bing were among the biggest and best real estate developers in New York during the first half of the 20th century. They were responsible for many of the finest pre-war apartment buildings being built in Manhattan for the luxury market, mostly on the Upper East Side, but also the Upper West Side, and in Greenwich Village.

They paid three million dollars for the hotel. William Tumbridge had championed Brooklyn’s own elite architect, Montrose Morris, to design his main additions to the hotel, but the Bing Brothers had their own golden boy, architect Emery Roth.

He designed many of the company’s best Park Avenue buildings, and the Bings chose him to design more wings for the hotel. The first one, completed in 1923, rose on the corner of Henry and Clark Street, giving the hotel the entire street front of that block of Henry and Clark.

Emery Roth was one of New York City’s finest residential architects, specializing in apartment buildings for the rich. This Hungarian Jewish immigrant, who had worked for the architects of the 1893 Columbia Exhibition, Burnham & Root, had been asked to join Richard Morris Hunt’s office in New York.

Hunt was very impressed with this Chicago architect’s talents, and hired him away from Burnham & Root’s drafting tables. By the 1920’s, Roth would be in business for himself, and would work quite often for Bing & Bing over the years. Many of the grand apartment buildings that line both sides of Central Park are Roth’s, including the iconic San Remo, the Beresford, the Eldorado, and 880 Fifth Avenue.

He was one of the first architects to design tall apartment buildings with setbacks, and then make terraces out of those setbacks, a feature that was as prized then, as now. His early buildings were in the popular Beaux Arts style, but he is best known for his Art Deco buildings, an angular style that is tailor-made for setbacks and ziggurat style design.

In 1930, the St. George tower was completed. Roth’s building towered over the rest of the hotel complex, mostly ten and twelve story buildings. This new tower was a very visible presence, and at 31 stories, was the tallest building in the Heights, and only topped by the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, completed only the year before.

It was huge, and added another 1,400 rooms to the hotel, bringing the grand total up to 2,632 rooms, beating out the Hotel New Yorker, in Manhattan, by 129 rooms, giving the right for the St. George to call itself the “Largest Hotel in New York.” And what a hotel it was.

When the tower was completed, the Bings had a three ton, 480 million candlepower revolving beacon installed on the roof, to celebrate the opening, and to act as advertising. On a clear night, it was powerful enough to pick out the Woolworth Building in Manhattan, and illuminate the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

The light was hailed as the most powerful one of its kind in civilian hands, and was built by Brooklyn’s own Sperry Company. The clear white light was also supposed to be a beacon to airplanes, but three years later, in 1931, the Department of Commerce, whose light house division operated the beacon, changed its rules, and stipulated that private owners could only operate lights with red beacons, as to not confuse the growing amount of air traffic over the city.

A red filter was added to the light, but it was weak, barely visible, and too expensive to continue with no real reward, so the St. George beacon was removed. So too were the lights in the two Manhattan hotels that had them, for the same reasons.

As cool as the powerful spotlight was, it didn’t hold a candle, pardon the pun, to the fabulousness that was the St. George salt water swimming pool. In 1929, the hotel had six 110 foot wells dug into the bedrock beneath the new hotel tower, to tap the salt water of the bay for the new swimming pool.

It was a grand Olympic size pool, the largest salt water pool in captivity, with a mirrored ceiling, and green and gold tiled walls, done only as a proper Art Deco pool could be done, with mosaics and figures in glazed tile.

The pool had a graduated depth of three to ten feet, had three diving boards of differing heights on the deep end, and an impressive ceiling to floor waterfall on the shallow end under which one could splash and swim. Massive square tile covered columns lined the sides of the pool, and there was a mezzanine gallery that looked down on the water.

The entire room glittered from the lights bouncing off the mirrored and glazed surfaces, and in a time of growing Depression, this was one of the wonders of the world. The pool would more popular than the rest of the hotel, bringing in swimmers well into the 1960’s.

Impressive, yes, but a huge hotel can’t make money from the pool alone. It needed to be full to capacity, and even more importantly, it needed to make money from the ballrooms, conference rooms and restaurants on the premises.

The St. George now took up entire square block, a huge footprint capable of handling more than one restaurant. So they had more, many more. The hotel had seventeen ball rooms, the largest of which was the Colorama Ballroom, designed by Winhold Reiss Studios in 1930.

It could hold 3,000 people, was lit by over a thousand light bulbs, and was an Art Deco wonder. There were coffee shops, lounges and bars, and themed restaurants galore, with names like the Stardust Room, the Fish Grill and Oyster Bar, a cantina called the Village, the Tower Ballroom, and many more.

Next time: More on the amenities of the St. George during its heyday – the period between the 1930’s and 1950’s, when the hotel was host to celebrities, athletes, gangsters, and more average Joes and Janes than you can shake a stick at. The St. George was host to weddings, social events and meetings for the large middle class of Brooklyn and beyond, and a destination still remembered by many. Next time we’ll take a look at the Largest Hotel in New York during its glory days, and some of the characters who kept this grand old hotel in the spotlight. For personal reminiscences and a great collection of photographs, please visit the St. George Tower Group on Yahoo. GMAP

Photo: St. George Tower Yahoo group

Photo: Brooklyn Public Library. Henry Street is in the front, Clark St to the left.
Colorama Ballroom. Photo: St. George Tower Yahoo group

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