Amos Eno

Amos Eno

Amos Richards Eno (November 1, 1810 – February 21, 1898) of Simsbury, Connecticut was an American merchant of dry goods who expanded into real estate in New York City, built the Fifth Avenue Hotel and established a prominent family fortune, of which the New York real estate alone was estimated at twenty million dollars at the time of his death.^[1]

Having clerked in a small general store in Hartford, Connecticut, he married Lucy Phelps, also of Simsbury, and moved to New York, where he and his cousin John Jay Phelps opened a profitable dry goods business. While making a fortune in the dry goods business, Amos Eno parlayed his profits into real estate investment in Manhattan, New York, buying corner lots and occasionally full undeveloped city blocks.^[2] His brownstone-fronted store at 74 Broadway had the reputation of having been the first use of brownstone in the city.^[3] Retiring from active participation as a merchant, he concentrated in 1856–59 in building the famous Fifth Avenue Hotel at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street in Madison Square, Manhattan, and the adjacent Madison Square Theatre in 1863. North of the Square he built a brick four-storey house at 233 Fifth Avenue that served as his residence for many years, then from 1890 housed the Reform Club of New York,^[4] recently (1888) founded by Anson Phelps Stokes.^[5] He and relatives established the Second National Bank of New York, headquartered in the hotel. In 1884 scandal hit the family bank when one of Amos' sons, John Chester Eno, president of the bank, embezzled millions of dollars and then fled to Canada to avoid prosecution. Eno never closed the bank, though three to four million dollars were withdrawn in panic, and made good his son's embezzlement, "though he never recovered from the shock".^[6]

After settling his son's debts, Amos retreated to the family summer residence in Simsbury, the Amos Eno House (1820, on the National Register of Historic Places) which had been erected by Eno's father-in-law, Elisha Phelps. Every summer the Eno family would visit the house, which was enlarged by Eno and by his daughter Antoinette Eno Wood. He was a founding benefactor of the Simsbury Free Library, among other local philanthropic gestures.

He held the greater part of a full block facing Broadway in Longacre Square (now Times Square). His last real estate speculations were in open lots in the Upper West Side.

Eno's portrait by Eastman Johnson, commissioned by his family in 1899, was a posthumous one, based on photographs; it is conserved in the New York State Museum.^[7] A grandson, Amos Richards Eno Pinchot (1873–1944), was an American reformist, a mainstay and the historian of the Progressive Party, 1912-16.

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