Jean Baptiste Martin who had been running a hotel in Panama during the first excavations there—­made by the French, as you may or may not remember—­came to New York in 1883.  He had been here the year before for a time and had decided the city needed a French hotel.  He arrived on the 25th of June, and on the 26th he bought the hotel!  He chose a house on University Place—­No. 17—­a little pension kept by one Eugene Larru, and from time to time bought the adjoining houses and built extensions until he had made it the building we see today.  He called it the Hotel de Panama.

But it was not as the Hotel de Panama that it won its unique place in the hearts of New Yorkers.  “In 1886,” Mr. Martin says, “I decided to change the name of my place.  ‘Panama’ gave people a bad impression.  They associated it with fever and Spaniards, and neither were popular!  So it became the Hotel Martin.  Then, when I started another restaurant at Twenty-sixth Street, the ‘Old Martin’ became the Lafayette.”

The artists and writers came to the Hotel Martin to invite their respective Muses inspired by Mr. Martin’s excellent food and drink.  From the bachelors’ quarters on the nearby square—­the Benedick and other studio houses—­shabby, ambitious young men came in droves.  Mr. Martin remembers “Bob” Chambers, and some young newspaper men from the World—­Goddard, Manson and others.  From uptown the great foreigners came down—­some of them stayed there, indeed.  In 1889, approximately, it started its biggest boom, and it went on steadily.  Ask either Mr. Martin or its present proprietor, Mr. Raymond Orteig, and he will tell you, and truthfully, that it has never flagged, that “boom.”  The place is as popular as ever, because, in a changing world, a changing era and a signally changing town, it—­does not change.

It was to the Hotel Martin that the famous singers came—­Jean and Edouard de Reszke and Pol Plancon and Melba; the French statesman, Jules Cambon, used to come, and Maurice Grau—­then the manager of the Metropolitan—­and Chartran, the celebrated painter, and the great Ysaye and Bartholdi.  And Paulus—­Koster and Bial’s first French importation—­to say nothing of Anna Held and Sandow!

A motley company enough, to be sure, and certainly one worthy to form the nucleus of New York’s Bohemia.

Says Mr. Martin:  “The most interesting thing that ever happened in the ‘Old Martin’?  I can tell you that quite easily.  It was the blizzard of 1888, when we were snowed in.  The horse cars ran on University Place then, the line terminating at Barclay Street.  I have a picture of one car almost snowed under, for the snow was fully six feet deep.  It was a Saturday night and very crowded.  When it became time for the people to go home they could not go.  So they had to stay, and they stayed three days.  They slept on billiard tables, on the floor or where they could.  We did our best, but it was a big crowd.  Interesting?  It was most interesting indeed to me, for I could get no milk.  I could supply them with all the wine they wanted, but no milk!  And they demanded milk for their coffee.  Oh, that blizzard!”