Located on the corner of Broadway and Vesey Street in what is now the Civic Center and Tribeca neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, it opened in 1836 and soon became the best-known hotel in America.

It was located on the west side of Broadway between Vesey and Barclay Streets, across from City Hall Park and diagonally across from the offices of the New York Herald.

[1] Its tree-shaded central courtyard was covered over in 1852 by an elliptical vaulted cast-iron and glass "rotunda" designed by James Bogardus,[5] that under the direction of its proprietor "Col." Charles A. Stetson (1837–1877) was the city's most stylish luncheon place for gentlemen.

For decades, the Astor House was the best known and most prestigious hotel in the country[8][9] and had an international reputation as the place where renowned literary figures and statesmen met.

Nearly five years later, on December 27, 1865, he again spent the night, this time as a prisoner of the North, while being escorted to the Washington Navy Yard where Federal authorities would decide whether to put him on trial.

The 1853 St Nicholas Hotel on Broadway at Broome Street was built for $1 million and offered the innovation of central heating that circulated warmed air through registers to every room.

A. Mitchell, The Last American, set in the far future, when Persian explorers in the ruins of New York come upon "an upturned slab" inscribed "Astor House": "I pointed it out to Nofuhl and we bent over it with eager eyes ... 'The inscription is Old English,' he said.

[17] The south section was demolished in 1913[18] in order to construct the Vesey Street tunnel for the Broadway subway line, which runs beneath the site; and Bogardus' luncheon pavilion went with it.