Mills House No. 1
building in Manhattan
Mills House No. 1 or the Mills Hotel at 160 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City was built as a hotel for poor men. It was funded by banker Darius Ogden Mills and designed by Ernest Flagg and opened in 1897. The building is now The Atrium.
Description
Mills House No. 1 is one of two survivors of three men's hotels built by banker Darius Ogden Mills in New York City (the other being Mills House No. 3). It originally contained 1,554 tiny rooms (7 and a half by 6 feet or 5 by 8 feet) that rented at the affordable rate of 20 cents a night, with meals costing 15 cents, The rooms contained only a bed with a mattress and two pillows, one stuffed with hair, the other with feathers, a chair and a clothes rack, and their walls stopped about a foot short of the ceiling. There were four toilets and six washbasins on each floor (for 162 rooms) and bathrooms on the ground floor.
The building extends along Bleecker Street from Sullivan to Thompson streets, occupying four city lots.
“Mills House No. 1” enters the record as building in Manhattan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mills, House and building can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Mills House No. 1” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mills, House and building provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6859981. Authority coordinates are 40.728, -74.000. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1897.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
- Historic place names
- Jurisdictional context
- Routes into maps and plans
Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Mills House No. 1”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Mills House No. 1 primary sources, Mills House No. 1 archive and Mills research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Mills House No. 1”?
- Which earlier names or jurisdictions may reveal additional records?
- What physical evidence or contemporary plan supports the description?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Mills House No. 1” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.