A room on Centre St, taking dates
Centre St is the sixth floor of the building at Grand and Centre, fitted as a private dining room and available by the date. One long table the length of the room. Folding chairs. Three daybed sofas, a bar station, and a chef's kitchen along the back with six burner induction, commercial refrigeration and dishwasher, and an ice machine with a five hundred pound bin. Dinnerware, cookware and glassware stay in the room.
It takes dinners, weddings, holiday parties, launches and private gatherings. You can cook in it yourself or bring a caterer.
What the building was for
The record is unusually apt. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows incorporated in 1844 with a purpose that reads like a brief for a venue: a library and reading rooms, apartments for natural history, science and the arts, school, lecture and meeting rooms. They laid a cornerstone at this corner in the summer of 1847 and had the building up the year after. It was dedicated in June 1849.
Joseph Trench drew it with John Butler Snook, in Connecticut polished brown sandstone. The second floor held committee rooms, the library and the Order's own post office. The third carried three lodge rooms and the fourth two more. Under the dome sat a rotunda lit from sixteen windows, built to hold twelve hundred people.
1881, and this ceiling
Robert Hoe, of the printing-press family, bought the building at auction in March 1881 and put John Buckingham on converting it. The dome and the rotunda came down and a two storey mansard went up in their place. The building rose four storeys and stands six, which places this floor inside that mansard and makes the ceiling sloping toward the windows the underside of the roof.
The sandstone front survived all of it. The building has been an individual New York City landmark since 1982.
Now
A room built in 1847 for the business of gathering people is available, by the date, for gathering people.
