41ststreet

Coffee for 41st St. Bread line (LOC)

from The Library of Congress

• Pixel Wrangler said:

  This is likely the "Knickerbocker Hotel Bread Line". Opened in 1906, The Knickerbocker Hotel was located at 1466 Broadway at the southeast corner of 42nd Street in New York City, The new hotel had 556 rooms but was organized around the dining and entertaining rooms on the lower three floors -- with 2,000 restaurant seats to feed the theater district traffic (with a gold dinner service for 48). [1] The back door to the hotel was on 41st Street, and some of the unemployed and hungry men, women and children would line up there, where they were given a little something to eat. As a run-up to America's entering World War I, there was record unemployment in New York City, and the winter of 1914-1915 was especially hard. The New-York Tribune reported on February 05, 1915:

  "More than 1,400 men and 93 women were fed yesterday afternoon In the Hotel Knickerbocker bread line. Eighteen overcoats and twenty-seven suits of clothes were distributed to the more destitute men in the line by guests of the hotel. Two hundred articles of wearing apparel donated by women employees and guests of the hotel were distributed among the needy women and girls who joined the pitiful procession."

  On some days, as many as 3,600 unemployed people would be waiting in the Knickerbocker Hotel bread line for something to eat. [2]

• Art Siegel said:

  Also, seems like a match for this LOC print that bears the caption note: "Caption on corresponding print in LOT 10830: Bread Lines - Bowery man on the Bread Line at the Knickerbocker Hotel, Feb. 1915."
  
  
  
  Not sure why note isn't on this, too.