Here is a great view of the Colonial Hotel, covered in American flags taken on 125th Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem, New York, around the late 1890’s.
The Colonial Hotel had it all a luxurious wood grain cafe and bar, an over the top main dining and a dining room for ladies – a dining room for ladies!
In the photo above there are three different bottles of liquor pictured on the table at the right foreground of the advertisement. Coronet Sloe Gin, Old Quaker Rye Whiskey and Coronet Dry Gin. Suggesting that even though this was a dining area for women only they still served liquor.
The image is captioned at the bottom margin and reads:
Ladies Dining Room, Colonial Hotel, 125th St. And 8th Ave, New York.
The Hotel Colonial had quite a history from the Gilded Age Harlem scandal of 1895, the scandalous murder trial of Mary Alice Almont Livingston Fleming Bliss who lived in the hotel and poised her mother Elvina Bliss for inheritance with Arsenic and Clam Chowder according to the book Arsenic and Clam Chowder, by James D. Livingston (the dining room pictured may have been the scene of the crime) to the Supreme Court trial of bribery involving The Colonial owner John H. Tonjes in 1913.
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