From 1853 to 1856 it was the site of Franconi's Hippodrome, a tent-like structure of canvas and wood which could accommodate up to 10,000 spectators who watched chariot races and other "Amusements of the Ancient Greeks and Romans".

"[6] A correspondent for The Times of London, in New York to cover the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1860, called the hotel "a larger and more handsome building than Buckingham Palace.

"[5] The hotel employed 400 servants to serve its guests,[5] offered private bathrooms (an unprecedented amenity at the time)[5] and ran advertisements featuring a fireplace in every room.

The day that he arrived, the street in front of the hotel was crammed with cheering and shouting people hoping for a sight of him, while a band played and a local militiaman set off a small piece of field artillery at intervals.

Two years later, shortly before Election Day, as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, McClellan reviewed a massive 2 1/2 hour long torchlight parade of his supporters from a balcony of the hotel.

The hotel was also "...a gathering place for fat cats like Boss Tweed, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk and Commodore Vanderbilt, who would trade stocks here after hours.

"[17] When the superbly confident young Fisk – soon to be known as "Diamond Jim", one of the Gilded Age's premier robber barons – first arrived in New York, he stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel until he was temporarily ruined.

[18] On October 20, 1873, representatives from Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers Universities met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to codify the first set of college football rules.

Gore Vidal made the Fifth Avenue Hotel a setting in his novel 1876, for it was in a suite here that John C. Reid, editor of The New York Times woke the Republican National Committee chairman Zachariah Chandler, and worked out the campaign for the controversial presidential election of 1876.