Category:Manhattan Hotel, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Originally known as the Rittersville Hotel, the hotel started as a tavern which dated to before the Revolutionary War which was purchased by Michael Ritter in 1808. The tavern was built on the road between Easton, Bethlehem which led into Allentown then Reading. It was later rebuilt into a hotel.Although the exact year the hotel was built has not been established, the 1850 census of Hanover Township shows the hotel in operation with a total of 8 residents as of August of that year. The property was modernized several times during the Nineteenth Century.

The hotel was put up for sale in 1891 and purchaced by the Lehigh Valley Traction Company (Later known as Lehigh Valley Transit) and was renamed the Manhattan Hotel. It also served Central Park, which was also owned by the Traction Company. In addition, a dance hall and a sporting center for baseball was also established called Manhattan Park. In March 1897, the hotel burned down The hotel burned down in March 1897, the cause was believed to have been an overheated stove. A replacement hotel was built which consisted of 3 stories and had 20 rooms.

The rumor of the day was that Central Park, which was across the street from the hotel, had a menagerie but decided to close the menagerie in 1896 . The hotel's owner at the time was enamored of the two monkeys in the menagerie and decided to buy them. One of the monkeys supposedly started the fire that destroyed the hotel; however, there is nothing in the following newspaper stories to substantiate that rumor.

In the early years of the Twentieth Century, a store and a restaurant along with a bar were part of the hotel. However, with the advent of Prohibition and the Volstead Act in 1920, the business began to lose money and was subsequently closed in 1925. The property was torn down afterwards and the land redeveloped.