The Hotel Renwick / Diwan Indian Restaurant

You may know this building as Diwan, the wonderful Indian restaurant next to the Mill Pond. For more than 125 years and through many changes of ownership, this beautiful building with the cross-gambrel roofl ine has sat sentry over Manhasset Bay. For many decades it was a hotel, welcoming diners and lodgers alike, before the arrival of the Long Island Railroad started the transfor- mation of Port Washington into a commuting town. Featured below is easily one of the fi nest postcard views of early Port Washington, originally called Cow Neck. It was probably photographed by John Witmer, showing the Hotel Renwick at the center, and the bustling life encircling the Mill Pond circa 1905. The hotel has a nicely hand painted orange roof on this postcard, and to the right you can see sand trestles and actual sandbanks, which stretched all the way north to where Sousa School stands today. This view was taken from up on the hill at the Down Neck School, later renamed the Sands Point School.

A former Port Washington resident, David Smith, adds that “before it was the Renwick, it was called the Grapevine Hotel, run by my

Great Grandparents Henry and Emma Smith as early as 1870. Henry became ill in 1899 and Ren Smull took it over. There was a fi re in 1901 and it was referred to as the Renwick in the NY Times and the Grapevine in the Brooklyn Eagle, so the name had to have been changed about that time. There are articles in the Eagle referring to the Grapevine thought the 1890’s.”

Here is an incomplete list of the names of this longstanding Port Washington institution:

The Grapevine Hotel, The Renwick Hotel, Gildo’s, Winston’s, 360 Degrees Grille, Port Seafood Grill, Prime View, Wreck Chowder House & Clam Bar, Tease, Louis & Marxx All American, and fi -

Information and photos provided by Cow Neck Historical Society, cowneck.org