The Rockaway Beach Hotel, also known as the Hotel Imperial, was a very large hotel built in Rockaway,

Queens Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

during the late 1870s and early 1880s by the Rockaway Improvement Company. The hotel, promoted as the "biggest hotel in the world", ran along the Rockaway beachfront from the present-day Beach 110th Street to Beach 116th Street, thus locating it in the contemporary Rockaway Park neighborhood rather than Rockaway Beach as the name implies. The hotel, the product of an age of superlatives which also produced the

Brooklyn Bridge The Brooklyn Bridge is a hybrid cable-stayed/ suspension bridge in New York City, spanning the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Opened on May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the first fixed crossing of the East River ...

, was 1184 feet (360.9m) long and 250 feet (76.2m) wide. Construction of the hotel was beset by labor difficulties and lack of capital; a railroad station opened in front of the hotel on August 26, 1880, but, except for one wing which was pressed into service for the summer of 1881, the hotel, although construction was completed, never actually opened for business. It was torn down for its lumber in 1889. The name "Rockaway Beach Hotel" has been used for at least two smaller hotels since the original's demolition.

Sources

Vincent Seyfried Vincent Francis Seyfried (April 18, 1918-April 14, 2012, aged 93) was an American historian of Long Island. His work between 1950 and 2010 includes eleven books on trolley systems in Queens and Long Island, twelve books on areas of Queens, a seven- ...

and William Asadorian, ''Old Rockaway, New York, in Early Photographs'',

Dover Publications Dover Publications, also known as Dover Books, is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward and Blanche Cirker. It primarily reissues books that are out of print from their original publishers. These are often, but not always, books ...

, Mineola, NY, 2000. *

Vincent F. Seyfried Vincent Francis Seyfried (April 18, 1918-April 14, 2012, aged 93) was an American historian of Long Island. His work between 1950 and 2010 includes eleven books on trolley systems in Queens and Long Island, twelve books on areas of Queens, a seven- ...

, ''The Long Island Rail Road: A Comprehensive History'', Part Five, published by the author, Garden City, Long Island, 1966. 1881 establishments in New York (state) 1889 disestablishments in New York (state) Hotel buildings completed in 1881 Hotels in Queens, New York Rockaway, Queens Demolished hotels in New York City Hotels established in 1881 Railway hotels in the United States {{QueensNY-struct-stub