A Gilded Age millionaire builds the men-only “Waldorf of the slums” hotel on Bleecker Street

When you think of Gilded Age millionaires, the name Darius Ogden Mills probably draws a blank. Born in 1825 in Westchester, Mills based himself in Buffalo and California and made a fortune in banking and railroads. He got his modest start in business as a teenage clerk in Manhattan. Perhaps he remembered throughout his adult life the loneliness of being a young man in a big city, and the difficulty of getting a foothold and resisting the many temptations that could ruin the chance of success. This might explain why, as a retired older man, Mills moved back to New York to build Mills House No. 1 on Bleecker Street in 1897—the first of three “philanthropic hotels” he named after himself and funded in Manhattan. What’s a philanthropic hotel? Conceived by social crusaders alarmed by the sin and vice of the late 19th century Metropolis, its mission was to provide sanitary, morally uplifting lodging for working people whose only other options may have been a cheap flophouse or low-class…