Concourse Plaza Hotel (former)

Place Matters Profile

The Concourse Plaza Hotel once wined, dined, slept and bar mitzvahed the Bronx’s luminaries. From the mid-century belle of the Grand Concourse it became the symbol of the borough’s decay in the early 1970s. Today it is a city-owned residence for senior citizens and a reminder of a glamorous era in the Bronx’s past.

Originally built in 1922, the Concourse Plaza Hotel elegantly complemented the Grand Concourse’s stately apartment buildings. Overlooking Joyce Kilmer Park, the hotel was built across the street from the distinguished Bronx County Courthouse and near to Yankee Stadium. The Grand Concourse, designed in the late 1800s by Louis Aloys Risse and built between 1902 and 1909, was the Champs-Elysees of the Bronx. Shaded by trees, with traffic separated by wide lush medians, the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City called the concourse the “Park Avenue of middle-class Bronx residents.”

The hotel was first envisioned and funded by a group of prominent Bronxites who called themselves the Bronx Boosters. Its opening soiree in 1923 boasted Governor Al Smith as speaker. Soon every civic, business and religious organization in the Bronx was holding their banquets at the Plaza, a rival to its counterparts in Manhattan. The hotel’s ten upper floors were filled with apartments, each with its own kitchen and interior decoration in pink and green, while the ground level hosted amenities such as a barber, hair dresser, and valet. The main floor housed the famous Wedgewood and Crystal ballrooms, dripping with chandeliers.

Adding to the hotel’s allure was its role as the seasonal home of the New York Yankees. “Why, I remember when I first came to the Yankees in ’38,” said outfielder Joe Gordon, “and I got married and lived in the Grand Concourse Hotel in the Bronx, right down from the stadium. There’d be six or eight couples living in that hotel, and the guys would walk to the ball park together and the women would sit around and talk and do the dishes and come on over later.” Many other luminaries also stayed there and Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Truman and John Kennedy campaigned there.

When Joseph Caspi purchased the hotel in 1965 the neighborhood and the Concourse Plaza were still thriving, but crime had begun to increase. Articles about the neighborhood’s decline appeared quite frequently in local papers, perhaps hastening the real-estate downturn. As long-time clients like the Bronx Rotary began to move their gatherings elsewhere, Caspi concentrated on building a new business for the hotel, mostly catering to African-American Bronxites who rented the ballrooms for church functions and promotional dances. And, in 1971, Caspi’s son opened the Tunnel discotheque in the Baroque Room, which quickly became popular with its largely African American customers. Unpopular with some older residents in the area, the Tunnel was closed in 1973 for operating without a license.

When the fires began burning in the Bronx in the 1970s, the Concourse Plaza became a welfare hotel. The city was desperate to find shelter for welfare recipients who had lost their homes, and was willing to pay weekly hotel rates, which the Plaza manager promptly quadrupled. The city’s clients provided steady business in a floundering neighborhood, but the hotel was deteriorating, and was the scene of petty crime as well as a shooting.

Late in 1973, the city bought the hotel. Plans to convert it into a residence for the elderly were put on hold amidst the city’s fiscal crisis and the city-funded renovation of Yankee Stadium. In 1978, the city requested help from the federal government, and by 1982 elderly citizens moved in to the now more modestly appointed Plaza, some of whom had been married there or stayed there in its days of splendor.