When you think of Gilded Age millionaires, the name Darius Ogden Mills probably draws a blank. Born in 1825 in Westchester, Mills based himself in Buffalo and California and made a fortune in banking and railroads.

He got his modest start in business as a teenage clerk in Manhattan. Perhaps he remembered throughout his adult life the loneliness of being a young man in a big city, and the difficulty of getting a foothold and resisting the many temptations that could ruin the chance of success.

This might explain why, as a retired older man, Mills moved back to New York to build Mills House No. 1 on Bleecker Street in 1897—the first of three “philanthropic hotels” he named after himself and funded in Manhattan.

What’s a philanthropic hotel? Conceived by social crusaders alarmed by the sin and vice of the late 19th century Metropolis, its mission was to provide sanitary, morally uplifting lodging for working people whose only other options may have been a cheap flophouse or low-class boarding house.

“At a time when more single men than ever were migrating to New York City, Mills intended to keep single men away from women and families in the crowded tenement districts,” wrote Brian J. Pape in a 2020 Westview News article.

At the turn of the century, it would have been very unusual for a single adult to rent or buy living space of their own. Though bachelor apartments for men were popping up, most unmarried adults either lived with their family, in a room in a decent boarding house, or in a residential hotel, which could be expensive or dicey.

Mills House No. 1 was “one of a number of similar residential hotels established by moral reformers as safe, clean, and wholesome alternatives to the city’s supposedly licentious rooming houses, transient hotels, and the like,” stated Pape.

Philanthropic hotels were a popular cause among socially conscious millionaires at the time. Many were built specifically to guard the morals of the young women pouring into New York to study or work.

Department store magnate A.T. Stewart built a nine-story, baroque-style working women’s hotel on today’s Park Avenue and 32nd Street in 1876; it failed after a year because of stringent house rules. A Rockefeller family member funded Laura Spellman Hall on Hudson Street, run by the YWCA and open through the 1950s.

Like the men behind these hotels, Mills (at left) wanted to build something impressive. He purchased a block-long stretch of downtrodden Bleecker Street, a tenement district of Italian immigrants, between Thompson and Sullivan Streets.

Earlier in the century when Bleecker Street was an elite address, the land was the site of posh terraced residences called DePauw Row (below, 1896).

Mills commissioned architect Ernest Flagg (the genius behind the Singer Building, among others), who completed Mills House in the Renaissance Revival style.

The new residence had a central entrance, two wings, a marble tiled floor, electricity, eleveators, and 1,554 tiny rooms measuring no larger than 5 by 8 feet spread across nine floors.

“Each had only a bed with a mattress, two pillows, a chair, and a clothes rack; the walls stopped about a foot below the ceiling, allowing air flow but no acoustic privacy,” wrote Pape. “There were four toilets and six washbasins on each floor (for 162 rooms) and bath facilities only on the ground floor.”

A room per night at what was dubbed by curious New York newspapers as the “Waldorf of the slums” cost 20 cents—on par with what a flophouse on the Bowery might charge for much less impressive accomodations.

Dining options were also available at 15 cents a meal, with restaurant-style menus (below).

One meal tried by journalist Jacob Riis after he stopped by for a visit was not “as savory as the one they would serve at Delmonico’s, but he comes to it probably with a good deal better appetite, and that is the thing after all,” wrote Riis in The Battle With the Slum, published in 1902.

Riis noted that residents could take use of the “smoking and writing rooms, and a library for his use; games if he chooses, baths when he feels like taking one, and a laundry where he may wash his own clothes if he has to save the pennies, as he likely has to.”

Lounging around during the day, however, was strictly forbidden.

“Mills House hotels were closed during the day to encourage residents to seek work or be at their jobs,” wrote Pape. “The residents were required to pay in advance, and could not gain entry after midnight. If they arrived drunk at the hotel, they were refused entry even if they had prepaid.”

Mills was motivated by a sense of benevolence and concern. Yet he also operated the hotel as a business that could turn a small profit. He hoped to help men move up the economic ladder by fostering self-reliance and not treating them as charity cases.

So who were the men who took a room at Mills House No. 1—and then the second Mills House constructed on Rivington and Chrystie Streets in 1898 and a third in Midtown on Seventh Avenue in 1907?

“Although the hotel was planned for people of limited means, its quality attracted those from all income levels,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 1994 New York Times column.

“The 1900 census taker found clerks, cashiers, janitors, coachmen, laborers, porters, waiters, one acrobat, and a doctor, a lawyer and a stockbroker among the residents.”

“A reporter for The New York Tribune in 1899 also found a man who would not give his name but was called by others ‘Old Solitaire’ because he played cards by himself in a lounge every night without a word to anyone else.”

Another type of New Yorker also found the hotel to be a housing option, one that might have shocked Mills’ moral sensibilities.

According to the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, “Mills House’s “all male-housing accommodations was also particularly desirable to working-class gay men because they could live and socialize more easily undetected, though they still faced being harassed and arrested.”

Mills died in 1910, but he had set up a family trust to continue funding his three hotels until 1949, according to Pape. Mills House No. 3 on Seventh Avenue was converted to office space, and Mills House No. 1 slid into decline.

“When No. 1 was sold it became the Greenwich Hotel (for men), and by the 1960s it became the first hotel in New York to be called a ‘welfare hotel,’” noted Pape. A 1970 Village Voice article stated that 900 men lived in the Greenwich, which was the site of 17 robberies a day and massive lice infestation. (Hotel ad from the NY Post, December 1970)

Meanwhile, the Village Gate nightclub moved into the basement in 1958 in a space that once held Mills House’s laundry facilities. The Rivington Street Mills House would close and be demolished in the 1960s.

By the 1980s, the Greenwich Hotel was gone, and Mills House No. 1 was converted into an apartment building called the Atrium. The Village Gate left in the 1990s, though its iconic sign remains on the facade.

These days, what was once a dignified SRO hotel built by a philanthropist with a special concern for working-class men is now a co-op with 189 luxury units, according to Streeteasy.

Flagg’s handsome building still stands, and the initials of Darius Ogden Mills are still visible on a pediment cartouche above the entrance.

[Top photo: Wikipedia; second image: MCNY, 90.13.1.324; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: New York Historical; fifth image: MCNY, X2010.11.9984; sixth image: MCNY, X2010.11.226; seventh image: author’s collection]