85. Stephen Van Rensselaer House

Location: 149 Mulberry Street (originally 153 Mulberry Street)
Built: 1816
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 83001751
Listed: June 16, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008



Before it was a cheapjack clothier for touristic delectation--and, let's face it, probably also some immigrant's entrée into The Good Life--149 Mulberry Street was a Little Italy restaurant, Paolucci's. And some time before it was a restaurant, it was home to the Italian Free Library and Reading Room, serving the local community with what one account says was 3,000 books in Italian and 32 Italian daily papers from various parts of Italy. (Lord, what happened to the contents of this library?)

None of this is why 149 Mulberry was landmarked, though--neither the 1969 landmark designation report from the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission or the 1983 National Register of Historic Places nomination form say anything about Little Italy. Newer ones are somewhat more ecumenical, but many of these earlier reports are remarkably unconcerned about matters beyond a somewhat narrow architectural aesthetic (the NYC LPC reports from the '60s use words like "quaint" and "charming" a lot) and the Great Men of New York history.

It was landmarked because, well, it was (and is) a surviving wooden-frame Federal Style rowhouse, for one--as you'd imagine, not many survive because of the whole fire thing--and because it was one of the homes of Stephen Van Rensselaer III. He was...well, Fortune called him the 10th richest American of all time. Like many of the ultrarich New Yorkers of his day, he could trace his family back to the some of the earliest Dutch settlements in the New World--and like those families, too, he left his name on our landscape, specifically in the name of the engineering university he helped found.

80d. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



The headline for Christopher Gray's NYT article on 139 Greene Street called it "The Longest-Running Restoration in New York City."

The article was written in 1989.

And the restoration started in 1974, making it...what? A journey of thirty-four years? YEAH, THIRTY-FOUR YEARS.

Except possibly not really. Another 1997 NYT article referred to it as a site of a 1997 fund-raising auction, which suggests 139 was at least restored enough to hold a public gathering. If so, it went back under construction soon after, as an anonymous tipster to Curbed who wrote that by 2007, it had been boarded up for "10 years at LEAST." There has been progress, though. Compare my photocomposite above with another one from 2006: the dormer windows have been fixed up quite well.

Why is this taking so long? It's a Federal townhouse, not Pompeii! Well, a commenter on the Curbed thread posted above mentioned it was owned by Peter Ballantine--someone connected to the Judd Foundation--and his wife, adding "You just try maintaining a building in SoHo on an art supervisor's wages!" Reason enough, I think!

Still must be maddening to have that building in your everyday life, even if you just walk down its street from time to time. It always troubles the consciousness as a mystery, an occasion to ask oneself "why the fuck is this thing not done yet?" (Must be even more maddening to OWN it, obviously--you have to feel for the Ballantines--but bear with me here.) I say this from my personal experiences living in the city, and living with construction: nothing ever seems to happen as fast as you think it should. There's a townhouse near where I live that's been going through a protracted restoration process since I've moved to New York in 2001. Months, perhaps years go by where nothing seems to happen, then we spectators get a couple days of guys carrying out trash in big bins, then more silence and waiting. It doesn't seem as if there's much left to do. You know, just give the walls a good paint job and install some carpeting, and it's good to go. Like a variation on one of Zeno's paradoxes, we never arrive at the project's completion, slowing ourselves down as we have to finish each task as they become simultaneously become more trivial but more numerous.



Did I say 105 Mercer Street was the second-oldest building in the district? I did. But 143 Spring Street pre-dates it by a year or two, according to the NYC LPC report. Back when the world was young and I just started working in the city, I was oft tempted to dine here, as it was home to a tempting BBQ restaurant; now the horrible horrible shoe-slinger Crocs is scheduled to move in. Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you and your goddamn already-over shoe, Crocs! Stay away from my historic district! Not that I actually live or work in SoHo, but SoHo is still mine because I am a New Yorker and nothing New York is foreign to me and everything New York is a part of me! At least in a certain sense! Or whatever, just piss off!

80c. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



The Collect Pond was 48 acres of fresh water, west of where Chinatown is today. Shitting where they ate, New Yorkers and their tanneries, their slaughterhouses, their breweries turned it into a sewer. With a city growing ever-northward, this pollution could not stand, so authorities in the early 19C filled it with the remains of a nearby hill, and drained it into a ditch in the center of a new road. This became Canal Street. In 1819, the stinking trench was covered over; it seems like these four slightly dilapidated Canal Street Federals, all dating with 1821 or before, were built in a fit of unwarranted optimism--unwarranted because the damn stink didn't go away.

The stink's gone but 327, 325, 323, and 321 Canal Street will likely never be made respectable, even with their ole-time authenticity and cute pitched roofs. There's too much traffic in front of them, with all the cars and trucks going to and from Manhattan Bridge and the Holland Tunnel, and thus there's no incentive to make remake them into ritzy homes again. Canal Street's larded with foot traffic, too, as it hosts honky-tonk electronics stores, food vendors, foldaway tables with bootleg goods. Everybody is slow, distracted by all the goods dancing at the periphery of their vision; with my impatient temperament, this means I don't linger, regardless of the mystery that exists past the storefronts.

By the way, Samuel Morse--yes, the telegraph guy--lived in 321, the one with all the hubcaps in the window.

79. MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District

Location: 74-76 MacDougal Street and 170-188 Sullivan Street
Built: 1844 (MacDougal side) and 1850 (Sullivan side); extensively remodeled in 1920
Architects: Unknown; remodeled by Francis Y. Joannes and Maxwell Hyde
National Register Number: 83001736
Listed: June 30, 1983
Visited: June 1, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



A quick jaunt to the outskirts of Greenwich Village before we head back down to SoHo and the Civic Center.

These twenty-two row houses are smoove, as fresh and dewy and uniform in appearance as a newborn set of quints. There are few small differences for variety's sake. For example, the Sullivans' ground entrances are alternately topped with arches or ironwork; except for the left- and right-most ones, the MacDougals have paired first floor windows (originally entrances) with either lintels or fanned arches. And then there are the unusually vivid colors: some blacks, grays, and reds, but several blues, and with 180 Sullivan, a yellow. That all said, the continuous heights of lintels, sills, cornices make this district two real rows of row houses.



A key reason why these rows maintained their relative homogeneity is due to their continuous chain of ownership, staying in the hands of Nicholas Low and his descendants from 1796, when Greenwich Village was really just a village, to 1920, when it was the bohemian enclave of universal reputation. They were purchased by the Hearth and Home real estate company, owned by William Sloane Coffin (father of William Sloan Coffin Jr.). Instead of tearing them down and building bigger as would be customary for those days, the company remodeled them to provide attractive housing for the middle class and a communal--but private--garden in the space between the two properties. This makes MacDougal-Sullivan is not just an important specimen of New York City architecture, but a pioneering example of both historic preservation and block greening.

Today, the middle class couldn't afford squat here--recent residents include Debra Perelman, Anna Wintour and Richard Gere. (Edgar Varèse and Bob Dylan also lived here, decades ago.) Gere's house went for an insane $12 million last year. $12 million!

78b. Charlton-King-Vandam Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Varick, Vandam, MacDougal and King Streets
Built: Mostly the early to mid-1820s
Architects: Multiple
National Register Number: 73001215
Listed: July 20, 1973
Visited: June 1, 2008



With Richmond Hill out of the way, and the hill it sat upon leveled, John Jacob Astor set about developing Aaron Burr's old estate. He divided up the land and sold it off to builders who then filled it with the Federal style row houses then multiplying virally throughout the city to meet the growing city's housing needs.



Their constructors were multiple; their dates of construction, all throughout the early and mid-1820s. A few Charlton Street homes were felled by fire in 1840 and replaced by Greek Revival buildings. Others were replaced with larger interlopers, including a sizable Queen Anne school on King Street. Many buildings--including a hair-raising five addresses on both sides of Charlton--were demolished for various transportation schemes, including the widening of Sixth Avenue and the construction of the IND subway line: the blankness of walls facing Sixth Avenue serve as mute testament to missing neighbors. And yet the district is relatively homogeneous. Heights and features are frequently matched from building to building. It has a recognizable feel: small and residential and somewhat quiet.




It also feels rather dead. The streets are lined with cars, people walk out from time to time with laundry, but once again, there are these little details, like another dead Christmas wreath, that makes me wonder if anybody lives in these places. The white-noise from air-conditioning in Varick Street buildings--this on a Sunday, mind--overpowers most audible signs of life.

The premier reference book for New York City row houses, Bricks and Brownstones, describes the Federal row house in almost Tocquevillean terms. They were occupied by the "builders, lawyers, and merchants" (both B&B and the NYCLPC report uses the same phrase, hmm...) that were getting rich from the city's growing power as a port, a market, a manufacturer--yet both social attitudes and economic conditions conspire to keep most homes built in this period spare in detail and modest in scale:

"This handsome simplicity of the Federal style showed that the Classical ideals of architectural restraint were influential then, that the high cost of hand labor made elaborate architectural forms and details too costly except for the finest houses, and that social customs in New York did not yet demand a pretentious dwelling."

I'm going to guess that nowadays these homes' seductiveness as tokens of old New York make them more and more expensive than they were when they were built. Knowing the way New York is today, they can be only be owned by a certain social class who probably treat them as weekday pied-à-terres at best. They may own the houses but they don't live here--but then they don't live anywhere, per se. Maybe. Don't hold me to that.

77. House at 203 Prince Street

Location: 203 Prince Street
Built: 1833-34
Architects: Unknown
National Register Number: 83001731
Listed: May 26, 1983
Visited: June 1, 2008



203 is considered to be designed in a "transitional" style that borrows elements of Federal buildings James Brown House or 83-85 Sullivan and later Greek Revival ones. It sure seems a little showier, a little more genteel than those two, but apart from the interior, which I obviously can't view, documentation on the building cites the main Greek Revival elements as the cap moldings on the moldings--so this building distinguishes itself from other Federal Style buildings in ways that are totally lost on an uneducated doof like myself. Sure is nice, though. It immediately registers as a home in a way the others don't: blinds may be drawn, but there are stained glass pieces in some of the window panes.

Aaron Burr had a mansion round these parts, and its gateway stood where 203 now is. We'll get to the mansion next week when I cover the Charlton-King-Vandam district. But it summons the delicious sci-fi idea that on this land, maybe even inside this house, the gateway still stands, a portal to the ghost New York City that lives unseen alongside the New York City we can sense.

Oh hey, it's my birthday.

76. Houses at 83 and 85 Sullivan Street

Location: 83-85 Sullivan Street
Built: 1819
Architects: Unknown
National Register Number: 80002696
Listed: November 17, 1980
Visited: June 1, 2008



Is anybody living here? 85 Sullivan's door has a computer-printed sticker you'd think a tenant, pissed at the vandalism of an authetic Federal Style row house, would've peeled away long ago; but no, while scraped at the edges, it's otherwise intact and weather-beaten. On 83's door, sky blue and framed by columns, there's a crispy Christmas wreath still hanging six months after the holiday season. Are they undergoing subtle renovations? Are folks summering out in the Hamptons? Do the neighborhood kids think they're haunted, much like my childhood self used to think the old and hollow pre-war homes on my suburban street were? So curious.

75. James Brown House

A.K.A.: The Ear Inn
Location: 326 Spring Street
Built: 1817
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 83001717
Listed: August 11, 1983
Visited: June 1, 2008



Good God, y'all. A dignified gent that refuses to live out its golden years in retirement, this rare Federal townhouse is home to the Ear Inn bar, a neighborhood bar without a neighborhood. On the hot June Sunday I visit, folks with kids and strollers lounge around in the front, sipping Heinies under two trees as almost as crooked as the building. There are strings of lights and dead garlands from the holiday season that nobody's bothered to take down. There's no need to. People are chill here. It is a island of vibrancy, practically the only life in the neighborhood, which is still industrial in feel regardless of all the glassy new residences, including the impressive modern-parasitizes-old Greenwich Street Project, but they stay dumb save for the white noise roar of air-conditioning. (Where are these people coming from? How far must they walk?)



I don't go in. I'd feel awkward going in with a camera, just to take pictures.



James Brown: it has not been definitively established just who he was. The Ear Inn website relates stories, passed down from generation to generation, of a black man who may have been an aide-de-campe to George Washington and who just might be depicted in the iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware painting. (Amusingly, the site refers to the artist as Cass Gilbert, probably meaning Gilbert Stuart, even though it's actually Emanuel Leutze.) Christopher Gray, in a 2001 Streetscapes column, shows that the census records don't quite support the story, as the James Browns we have evidence of were either too young or too old. Or white. The landmark plaque above the entrance doesn't even go into all of that, preferring to talk in the certainties of its later life, its unique architectural detail, blah blah blah. As such, James Brown is this half-forgotten specimen of New York City history, just as his house is a half-forgotten specimen of New York City life.