Allerton Hotel for Women

It is a seventeen-story brick, limestone, and terra cotta building designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon in 1920.

It was built on the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 57th Street by the Allerton House Company at a cost of $700,000.

[1] The hotel intended to accommodate six hundred business and professional women and also shelter young girls.

[3] James Stewart Cushman was a founder and former owner of the Allerton chain of reasonably priced club hotels for white collar men and women which started in 1916.

The group of financiers who joined Allerton included George W. Perkins and Arthur Curtiss James.

[4] Cushman was injured critically in a car wreck in September 1934, when he collided with a truck on the Berlin Turnpike in Newington, Connecticut.

[8] The owners of the Allerton Hotel purchased the property formerly occupied by the De La Salle Institute in December 1923.

They also bought the adjoining Kinlock Apartments at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 58th Street, 71 by 100 feet.

The fourth store to lease space in the new edifice was Sheldon Cleaners and Dyers in March 1927.

Helen Whiley, a music teacher and graduate of Vassar College, tried to jump off the roof of the Allerton Hotel in May 1929.

[14] The Women's University Club made the Allerton Hotel its headquarters beginning in May 1956.

Police thought the infant belonged to one of eighteen pregnant women then residing at the hotel.