It was financed by Hulbert Harrington Warner, patron to the American astronomer Lewis Swift.

[1] By the time the 16-inch refractive telescope, made by Alvan Clark and Sons, was installed, it had cost Warner almost $100,000 but was the fourth largest in the United States at the time.

On Tuesday and Friday evenings, Swift opened the doors to the public to those who had bought a .25-cent ticket from Warner's Patent Medicine Store.

[1] After Warner was forced into bankruptcy in 1893, Swift moved the telescope to California where his new patron, Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, was building an observatory on Echo Mountain.

By that time observations in New York were becoming increasingly difficult due to the developing city around it.