There are not that many Beaux-Arts buildings left. The Willard Hotel in D.C. is one of them and narrowly escaped the wrecking ball in the '80s. One of these days I am going to stay in a room that has one of those beautiful huge round windows!

I wonder what the rates were in 1909.

The Astor was replaced by a skyscraper initially known as the W.T. Grant Building, now known as 1 Astor Plaza. Viacom is a primary tenant, and one of the Viacom cable channels (MTV) has broadcast from one of the lower-level studios. Total Request Live (or TRL), which introduced the world to Carson Daly, was one of those shows. That ain't working, that's the way they do it.

or a room with a flagpole sticking out the window

That 35-45 HP Renault Chassis would be $187,532.95 today's money.

It is easy to see the approximately 60% addition to the hotel looking down 45th street. Looks like 6 rows of windows newer looking than the rest of the hotel.

Nobody else has commented on this yet, but was it built 10-windows deep and later expanded by six more windows? Some of the pictures on the NY Architecture page seem to confirm that it started life more shallow.

[You might be looking at a picture of the Knickerbocker Hotel, which seems to be on that page by mistake. But yes, the Hotel Astor was enlarged by six windows at the back in 1908-1909. - Dave]

Under the Astor Hotel's clock was where Robert Walker and Judy Garland agreed to meet in the 1945 movie "The Clock."

Back on June 6, 1966, at 6:06 p.m., a group that had last met on May 5, 1955, at 5:55 p.m. gathered once again as planned at the Astor Bar to savor the moment. On September 9, 1999, at 9:09 a.m., at 9th Avenue and 19th Street, we had planned to meet again, but fate intervened and the venue was changed to the Deer Park Hotel in Newark, Delaware, close to the setting of our first gathering. Talk about having a life-long obsession with numbers on the calendar!

Fiat automobiles were"home made" upriver 75 miles in a beautiful art deco factory. The building became Western Printing home of all the Dell comic books you may have read long ago. All gone now. A Staples has since been built on the site.

[Upriver from Times Square? Everyone into the canoe! - Dave]

Good one! Yup, better than "up the river" some thirty miles (give or take).

Are there pictures of the Roof Garden? What is the building that replaced this hotel when it was torn down?

Xesús Cociña Souto (Santiago de Compostela, Galiza, Spain)

[Click here. - Dave]

Another great building from the golden age of window awnings!

back in '57, when I was a new immigrant with a couple of bucks in my pocket, nursing a 15 cent draft beer at the bar. It was where I went to get away from the cheap rooming house on 36th Street. Ten years later, when they tore it down, that little beer was something with an olive in it and I spent more than two bucks tipping my doorman at the place where I still live. I was sorry to see my old hangout turn to dust.

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GON/GON023.htm

Just got pinched in the Astor bar?

Cole wasn't writing about the roof garden, but I've always loved that line.

And here I haven't even seen the film yet.

I'm not aware that Renault automobiles were sold in America that early, but look at that taxi stand. There's a remarkable resemblance to the cabs that saved Paris in 1914.

[The Renault Taxicab Company was incorporated in New York in 1907 and operated out of the Renault garage. - Dave]

New York Times, 1920:

Down near Times Square the Hotel Astor Roof Garden and Belvedere Restaurant make it possible for the wayfarer to leave the torrid stretches of Seventh Avenue and in a few moments find himself in a real garden surrounded by flowers.

There is the open-air dancing floor and the restaurant is conspicuous for dangling ferns and trailing vines. A unique feature of the restaurant is the gabled-glass roof over which flows a miniature Niagara.