Windsor Hotel fire

You are standing at the former site of the Windsor Hotel, which once occupied the block between Forty-Sixth and Forty-Seventh Streets on Fifth Avenue. On Saint Patrick's Day in eighteen ninety-nine, this grand destination for the wealthy turned into an inferno in just minutes. As the city's annual parade marched past the hotel, a gentleman in a second-floor parlor tossed a lit match out a window, where a breeze caught it and blew it directly into a lace curtain. The fire spread with terrifying speed through the building's interior, claiming nearly ninety lives in what remains the deadliest hotel fire in New York City history.