The German Hostelries of Battery Place

The two Rotographs on this page date from around 1905, but the architecture seen in them echoes backwards and forwards across a span of Manhattan history at least 160 years in duration. Walter B. Chambers's 1882 Washington Building (the red structure above) still stands along Battery Place between Broadway and Greenwich Street, though it has been greatly modified and is now known as the International Mercantile Marine Company Building or as One Broadway. The Bowling Green Building, which dates from the 1890s and was formerly associated with the White Star Line, is likewise still extent; its address is 11 Broadway.

On the other hand, the three low buildings to the left of the Washington Building, two of which can be seen more clearly in the card below, are long gone, as are, of course, the elevated railway tracks and station seen in the background. (I'm not quite sure why the Bowling Green Building is not visible from this angle.)

Those three buildings can be dated to at least 1853, when they were captured by Victor Prevost in one of the earliest photographic city views of Manhattan, shown below. They stand on the right side, clustered in front of the steeple of Trinity Church.

It's possible that the buildings even predate the great fires of 1835 and 1845, which destroyed much of what is now lower Manhattan but seem to have skirted Battery Place. In any case, in the early years of the 20th century the tallest of the three was Reinhardt's Hotel, an establishment that appears to have catered to the city's large German immigrant community. It was already Reinhardt's in 1879, when the New York Times recorded the suicide in his room of one Albert Sattler, 45, a recent immigrant from Coln (that is, Cologne). The building to its immediate left was the Battery Park Concert Garden, which also may have catered to Germans, while the third building (only partly visible in the second postcard) was the Lion Brewery. The roughly contemporary images below show greater detail, including the doorway of an Exchange Office with a German inscription.

The three buildings were still standing at least as late as 1930 (below), but they looked a bit the worse for wear. They were apparently demolished around 1947.

Sources: Scouting New York has a nicely illustrated post about One Broadway. The German-language blog New York - History - Geschichte has a long (but somewhat difficult to navigate — scroll down to Part 3) article on "The Lost Houses of Battery Place," from which several of the above images were taken. The melancholy account of the death of Albert Sattler can be found in the New York Times of May 3, 1879.