One Broadway

The lot was sold in 1745 to Royal Navy captain Archibald Kennedy. The house was a symmetrical two-story mansion with materials imported from the Netherlands; its features included two stone string courses and a slightly projecting center portion with a Palladian window. A parlor was 50 feet long and connected to the adjacent house at 3 Broadway

Kennedy occupied the house until 1776, during the American Revolutionary War, when he fled to New Jersey after the Americans lost the Battle of Brooklyn. Washington and his army fought to hold Manhattan but retreated in early October. The Kennedy house then served briefly as headquarters for Continental Army generals Henry Lee III and Israel Putnam and possibly for General George Washington, as well as high-ranking generals of the British army. The Commander-in-Chief, America, Sir Henry Clinton, and Sir Guy Carleton (Lord Dorchester) (1782-3). The British made Manhattan their headquarters in America during the war, with One Broadway as the Commander's Headquarters.

The structure then became the Washington Hotel.