Mills House No. 1

[1] 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,[2][3] 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.

[2] It cost $1.25 million to build and has eleven stories; two 100-foot (30 m) air shafts or light wells, 50 feet (15 m) square, capped by skylights, enabled each room to have a window[4] and correspond to the provisions of the 1879 Tenement House Law known as the "Old Law"; the architect, Ernest Flagg, was an advocate for housing reform who had urged these requirements.

3, which opened in 1907 with somewhat larger rooms and somewhat higher prices,[3][8] still stands at 485 Seventh Avenue, at the northeast corner of 36th Street.

[3] Mills House hotels were closed during the day to encourage residents to seek work.

1 was operated by a family trust after Mills' death until 1949, when it was sold and became the Greenwich Hotel;[10] it remained for men only.

[6] Some remembered it as "a mean flop house [where] winos and junkies could get a room ... for $2 a night"[12][13] and where someone was once killed by a table that had been thrown out of a window.

[14] The jazz club The Village Gate operated from 1958 to 1994 in the former laundry in the basement of the building and later also on upper floors.