Biography

Edward Cornelius Delavan was the owner of the famous downtown hotel and restaurant the Delavan House, notorious for open bribery and assorted shenanigans of state legislators during the Tammany Hall era. The booze flowed freely at his hotel, and he was a successful wine merchant who, later in life, did an about-face and became a rabid teetotaler and fanatical leader of a national temperance movement.