Postcard Thursday: Rear Views

James has a story in today's New York Post that examines many of the hidden homes in New York City that were once carriage houses, rear tenements, or -- as is the case in the photo above -- an artist's studio and theater.

"Washington Square, New York" (1910) courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The artist was Everett Shinn, a member of the Ashcan School, who lived and painted in New York starting in the late 1890s. Like many Greenwich Village bohemians of the era, Shinn wasn't content to merely paint and founded a small theatrical company to perform plays he'd written. These melodramas had

titles like “Lucy Moore, the Prune Hater’s Daughter.” Though not home to high art — the New York Times called one participant “the worst actor in the New World” — Shinn’s theater is credited with paving the way for the Off-Off-Broadway theaters of today.

You can read the entire story at https://nypost.com/2019/01/09/back-houses-are-nycs-best-kept-secrets/

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Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: Hans Haacke

Installation view; Whitney Museum of American Art. Photography by Ronald Amstutz

A few years ago, James wrote a story for Curbed about the artist Hans Haacke and one of his most famous artworks, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971.
This work was one of the controversial pieces that caused Haacke's 1971 solo show at the Guggenheim Museum to be cancelled. As James writes, Haacke

undertook to map out the holdings of prolific real estate investor Harry J. Shapolsky, who at the peak of his career had owned as many as 200 tenements in Harlem, the East Village, and the Lower East Side. Using public records, Haacke painstakingly unearthed the dozens of shell corporations that Shapolsky and his relatives had created to control properties around the city. Haacke then photographed each property and presented his findings—142 buildings in all—as gelatin silver prints, each accompanied by a dossier of facts: the building's address, block and lot number, lot size, and building type. Below that was information on ownership: corporate entity, date of acquisition, cost of the mortgage, the names of which of Shapolsky's associates were involved, and the assessed land value.

That same year, Haacke also researched and created a second piece: Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. That piece is now owned by the Tate, but is currently on view at the Met Breuer as part of its exhibition "Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy," which is on view at the Met's Madison Avenue outpost through March 31, 2019. As New York spirals toward ever-increased gentrification, Haacke's sobering take on real-estate chicanery are well worth exploring.

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Want to hear more about NYC history?

Inside the Apple has recently been released for the first time as an audio book!

Visit Amazon or Audible to download today

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: Trinity's Real Estate Empire

looking up Wall Street at Trinity Church

Yesterday, James had a feature in Curbed NY about the history of Trinity Church's real estate holdings in Lower Manhattan. By the end of the nineteenth century, Trinity had become the second-largest land owners in New York City, but much of what they owned in the area now know as Tribeca was actually in terrible shape. Trinity was called out by the local press as one of the city's biggest slumlords and it became a huge scandal.

(This area has been in the news recently because Disney is going to be building a new headquarters on some of Trinity's land in what was once the center of this slum.)

The whole story is fascinating:

https://ny.curbed.com/2018/8/22/17764064/trinity-church-real-estate-history-hudson-square.

an artist's rendition of what the original Trinity looked like ca. 1698

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Want to hear more about NYC history?

Inside the Apple has recently been released for the first time as an audio book!

Visit Amazon or Audible to download today

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: 1868

In 1868 -- one hundred and fifty years ago -- the department store James McCreery and Co. opened at the corner of Broadway and 11th Street. While the city had been expanding northward since the layout of the famous grid in 1811, that growth had always been slow, and for many people, Greenwich Village remained the hub of the city. The stretch of Broadway that James McCreery picked for his new store, across the street from Grace Church, had tremendous curb appeal.

James wrote a piece for The New York Post about 1868 real estate that appeared in today's paper. Since the early 1970s, McCreery's has been an apartment building, and James looks at it and other homes in the Village -- and around the city -- that are currently on the market.

You can read the story at https://nypost.com/2018/02/21/the-year-that-changed-new-york-city-real-estate/.

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Read more about New York City history in our two books:

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
and

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: Thomas E. Davis

The stereo view above shows the Pavilion Hotel on Staten Island, which was originally built to be the home of 19th-century real estate developer Thomas E. Davis.

Who?

You're not alone: Davis -- who by some accounts was the third-largest land owner in the city -- has been almost totally passed over by history.

To rectify that, James wrote a piece for CurbedNY that appeared yesterday. Read it at: http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/02/11/the_forgotten_developer_who_transformed_19thcentury_nyc.php.

The only picture James was able to dig up of a Thomas Davis shows this fellow:

Is that our Thomas Davis? Alas, we may never know.

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Explore more NYC history in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,

you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or

from independent bookstores across the country.

And, of course, Inside the Apple is available at fine bookstores everywhere.

A Look Back at 1 Wall Street

Today marks the 105th anniversary of a record-setting real estate sale in Manhattan -- the purchase of 1 Wall Street for $700,000, or $4 a square inch, on June 7, 1905.

As skyscrapers began to proliferate in the financial district, the owner of 1 Wall Street refused to sell his old cigar store for "personal" reasons. (You can see the cigar store in the drawing, right, in the foreground.) Only upon the owner's death did the land finally change hands. The new owners, the St. Louis-based Mercantile Trust Company, erected a thin 18-story skyscraper on the lot, soon dubbed the "Chimney Corner" due to its  narrow shape. The Chimney Corner, opened in 1908, only lasted about twenty years. In 1928, the Irving Trust Company purchased the lot and the adjoining building at 7 Wall Street to raze them for a gigantic office tower. Though it is not known exactly how much Irving Trust paid for each individual lot, Daniel Abramson notes in Skyscraper Rivals that it would have been "in the range of $15 million....making it possibly the most expensive piece of real estate in the world."


When Irving Trust was preparing the build their new skyscraper, The New Yorker did some due diligence on 1 Wall Street and discovered that the bank was only the fifth owner of the lot since the 1600s. What makes it especially important to us is that the first owner, back in the 1650s, was Johannes Nevius, James's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather.

We surmise that Johannes's house was knocked down when the wall that gave its name to the street was built in 1653. Who built on the site next is unclear, but William Dyckman was living at 1 Wall Street in the 1820s. Presumably it was Dyckman's house that was replaced by the cigar store, then the Chimney Corner, and then Irving Trust. When the bank's cornerstone was laid in 1930, two men were invited to participate in the festivities: a descendant of Washington Irving, for whom the bank was named, and a descendant of Johannes Nevius.


Irving Trust still looms over the corner of Wall Street and Broadway today, though it is now known as the Bank of New York. Its original public lobby--now closed to the public--has fantastic mosaics by Hildreth Maier that we'll discuss in a later blog posting.

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Read more about New York's skyscrapers and Wall Street in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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For Sale: The Narrowest House in New York

The press has been having a field day this week with the news that New York's narrowest house -- No. 75-1/2 Bedford Street -- is on the market for $2.75 million.

This is one of the most popular stops on our tours of Greenwich Village and appears in every guidebook. Unfortunately, most of those guidebooks also perpetuate the stories that Cary Grant and John and/or Lionel Barrymore stayed at the house, despite the fact that there's not a shred of evidence to connect either one to the home.

The entire property in that area was once owned by a coppersmith named Harmon Hendricks. His house, No. 77 Bedford, stands at the corner of Bedford and Commerce; built in 1799 it is the oldest home in the Village. Though No. 75-1/2 is often dated to 1873 (when it appears on tax rolls), it is stylistically older and may have been built as early as the 1850s.

The entire Henricks property was bought by the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1923, who converted a former brewery and factory space at 38 Commerce into the theater and planned to rent the rest of the property for profit. The Cherry Lane was founded by a group of refugees from the Provincetown Playhouse (which has been in the news a lot recently, too) including Edna St. Vincent Millay, who moved into the narrow house at 75-1/2 Bedford in 1924. It was Millay and her husband who remodeled the home, adding a skylight and the Dutch gabling on the front and back.

The other famous tenant to live in the house is anthrpologist Margaret Mead. What most press coverage leaves out is that Mead was living there with her sister and brother-in-law, the cartoonist William Steig (best known today, perhaps, as the creator of Shrek).

The New York Post has a feature on the house, including a photo essay in the post that doesn't necessarily reveal a lot about the interior, but does give a great view of the unique four-in-a-row burner stove. Over at Curbed, you can download the floorplan as you mull over whether or not $2.75 million is a good price for owning a conversation piece.

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We have three different tours that you can take to see the city's narrowest house.

• You can book your own private walking tour with us at http://www.walknyc.com
• You can take a self-guided tour of the neighborhood using our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City
• Or you can download an audio tour of the area that we created for our partners at CityListen.com.

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And speaking of CityListen -- they are having a great contest right now to give away a free pair of Kuru walking shoes. All the details are at http://blog.citylisten.com/2009/08/favorite-walks-contest/. But hurry -- the deadline for entries is September 6th.

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