WATERTOWN — Fifty years after the Woodruff Hotel was demolished here, in April our north country neighbors in Malone saw the razing of the Flanagan hotel, further erasing an era when premiere luxury hotels helped to shape communities.
They brought the wealthy and the curious —- their travels aided by nearby railroads at both establishments. Both hotels had their own luxuries, while necessities of the day included in-house barbershops, where townsfolk could hobnob with people with faraway places. The Woodruff welcomed President Ulysses S. Grant and activists Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. The Flanagan hosted President Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison and Babe Ruth.
The fate of both hotels began to be sealed when railroad passenger traffic plummeted in the early-to-mid- 20th century. Watertown’s Woodruff, at the intersection of Court Street, opened in 1851 and was demolished in the winter of 1976, three years after it was shuttered.
In Ogdensburg, the Seymour House, built in 1842 when the village was a busy port, was designed to replace structures destroyed by the 1839 “Great Fire.” With the arrival of the Northern Railroad in 1850, the hotel expanded to 100 rooms a year later. The hotel’s dining room and bar were legendary.
The Seymour, at the corner of Ford and State streets, was demolished in the late 1960s as part of Urban Renewal projects.
“The hotel remains a fixture in city residents’ memories,” Ogdensburg Historian Julie Madlin wrote in an essay for the Sept. 17 issue of the St. Lawrence County Advance News. “It lives on through the stories of rocking chairs (on the porch), community events, and 15-cent sodas that defined downtown for generations.”
‘What it can be’
Malone’s Flanagan Hotel was built in 1914 to replace a smaller structure built in 1857. Minutes before a piece of heavy equipment tore into the six-story building on April 13, Malone Mayor Andrea M. Dumas told the gathered crowd, “Economic development doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when leaders have the courage to make hard decisions. It happens when villages and counties stop looking at what it was and start building towards what it can be.”
Such progress was hard to watch for some, including Carol Poole, a staff member of the Franklin County Historical Museum and Society in Malone.
“I’m sure it’s been a hard thing for people who have lived in Malone their entire lives to see the Flanagan go, but it was equally difficult to see it deteriorating,” Poole told the Malone Telegram. “I feel sadness because it was such a part of life for our community for such a long time and has so many memories for so many people. It’s hard to see it go.”
The village of Malone plans to sell the cleared lots where the former Flanagan Hotel and adjacent Lashomb building stood to attract a developer for downtown revitalization. Dumas estimated the property has around 126 linear feet of road frontage and that approximately 26,000 vehicles drive past the property daily.
In August, Dumas told the Telegram: “It could be a great mixed-use facility. It would be nice to have a first-floor commercial business,” adding she would personally like to see senior housing included in a future building if that’s feasible. “We want to work with somebody that is going to work towards what our downtown is going to be.”
In Woodruff’s shadow
In Watertown, it took about two decades for the cleared Woodruff site to see development.
The hotel was designed by architect Otis L. Wheelock, who helped rebuild and reshape the look of Watertown following the “Great Fire” of May 13, 1849, the most devastating blaze to ever hit the city. The “Woodruff House” was built by Norris Woodruff in partnership with son-in-law Howell Cooper, Henry Keep and Pearson Monday.
From the start, the five-story Woodruff House (later named Hotel) was Watertown’s showpiece. Its opening was a matter of good timing. In 1850, the first tracks were laid in Rome for what was to become the Rome and Watertown Railroad. In 1851, it reached Watertown, with the depot conveniently behind Woodruff House.
Within a few decades, Watertown would become a thriving industrial town with various mills and factories. The hotel would install early luxuries like electric bells and city telephones. The Woodruff House and area around it also became the place shop:
“The new stores in the Woodruff Block are fast filling up,” the New York Reformer reported in October of 1851. “The north side of the mall and court street will soon present one of the most magnificent line of stores to be found in the country … nearly a half mile in extent, an uninterrupted series of capacious, well filled and elegant stores.”
In August of 1872, Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Watertown by train from Utica as part of a combined campaign swing and vacation to the Thousand Islands, where millionaire industrialist George Pullman hosted Grant for five days. Grant was running for reelection to the presidency against Horace Greeley, an effort being backed by the Watertown Times. The war hero-president, who as a 26-year-old Lt. Quartermaster with the 4th Infantry served at Madison Barracks in Sackets Harbor, was greeted by a throng of 12,000 citizens jammed into Public Square when he spoke briefly from the balcony of Woodruff House. Grant also stopped at the Seymour House in Ogdensburg during his stay.
In a project from 1919-1921, 140 rooms were added to the Woodruff’s existing 110 rooms and telephones were installed in every room. Also, a new kitchen was installed, as well as elevators, new plumbing, electrical work and fireproofing.
Times’ reports say the summer of 1926 gave the hotel its most profitable season, with an average of 300 guests registered over a six-week period.
A place for community
The hotel was also a community hub as it was the place for social celebrations such as wedding receptions, fashion shows and anniversaries. From the lobby, the second-floor ballroom was reached via a marble staircase.
World War II brought temporary prosperity to the Woodruff with the arrival of an influx of soldiers at what was then called Pine Camp. But the hotel’s golden years were coming to an end. Rail travel was declining, hotel competition was increasing, and shoppers had other options.
Woodruff Hotel Co. filed a petition for involuntary bankruptcy in July of 1973. A few weeks later, the company announced the hotel would close Oct. 1 and its contents, from air conditioner s to paintings, would be sold.
Demolition of the hotel began in January of 1976 by Northern Demolition Inc. “The walls of Hotel Woodruff started crashing to earth this morning, as one man with a crane and a 5,500-pound ball set out to undo the efforts of scores of masons who had worked the building over the past 150 years,” the Watertown Daily Times reported on Jan 21, 1976.
The building’s rubble was removed for landfill near the intersection of State Routes 11 and 37. On June 11, 1976, the Woodruff site was to be sold at a public auction, but nobody showed up to submit a bid. There was once talk of a development company working with the Department of Housing and Urban Development for a complex of rental units at the site.
In the summer of 1996, construction was completed on a medical building on some of the land that occupied the former Hotel Woodruff. In 2003, Watertown Local Development Corp. agreed to lend a group of investors up to $30,000 to explore whether a hotel would make sense on the vacant half of the former Hotel Woodruff site. Preliminary drawings were created of how the project could fit on land between the Woodruff Professional Building and the Iron Block buildings at 29-39 Public Square.
In 2017, consultants working on a city downtown grant suggested pursuing construction of a hotel at the site of the old Hotel Woodruff, between Cam’s Pizzeria and the Woodruff Professional Building.
Some readers of the Watertown Daily Times wrote letters to the paper in 1976 expressing their displeasure of the hotel’s demolition:
“We think that this historical landmark should have been restored by the city of Watertown,” wrote Coleen Jank. “If the citizens had taken a collection, we could have restored it.”
“Not all cities spend other people’s tax dollars to demolish buildings as Watertown does,” wrote an unidentified reader. “It seems good to visit cities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere and see officials having old landmarks restored and buildings refaced as they were originally.”
Some Woodruff tenants were reluctant to leave, even after demolition began:
“City Patrolman Gary B. Wood was walking a beat on Public Square Friday night when he heard a woman screaming,” the Watertown Daily Times reported Feb. 28, 1976. “He ran to in front of the Woodruff, where he found the woman frightened by several rats. The officer killed one of the rodents with his night stick, but the others ran down the alley and back into the Woodruff.”