80a. 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



390 West Broadway (unknown architect, 1895) lies outside of the ostensible subject of this post, the SoHo Historic District. Instead, it looks forlornly at the other side of the street, where other buildings sit snugly-wugly under the protection of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America has been agitating to get district expanded; while 390 is within one of the areas under consideration, its 72-page submission to the NYC LPC has almost nothing about it. And why should it? Architecturally, it is nothing special; historically, it was the site of an unusually large police raid ("...they included some of the worst pickpockets and second-story men who ever were in Sing Sing.") and that appears to be about it.

I start my blog's investigation of SoHo with this middling exception because this is where I began with SoHo, close to a quarter-century ago. 390 used to house a store called Think Big!--yes, the exclamation point was part of the name. Its great gimmick was that it sold comically oversized replicas of the quotidian. Pencils, crayons, toothbrushes, postage stamps--stuff you'd learn to manipulate through years of delicate negotiation with your fingers, now scaled to barely fit the hand. This was stuff with the immediacy of pop art--the store seems to have been called "Pop/Eye-Think Big" at first--but with none of that nasty distance even Warhol could give off.

I first heard about the store from a Games Magazine article the year before. It had a picture of a woman carrying a giant yellow crayon and a quizzical expression; it was love. After a year of fascination, Dad took drove me there one humid morning near my twelfth birthday. (That was June 20th, 1983.) North Bellmore, Queens, Brooklyn, a special trip over Brooklyn Bridge, because it had just turned 100, then down to SoHo. I remember faint surprise that dad would take me someplace so desolate; mind you, I'm almost twelve at the time and have little experience with true urban desolation, so the discomforting SoHo of 1983 might be nothing to me now, or it might be the scary human-free void of pre-gentrification lore. Can't remember. There's too space between the then and now. In fact, in my memory of the place as it was, most of the buildings are lopped off to one story, and dad parks the car on cobblestone. I don't know how I could've imagined that. After about forty-five minutes agonizing, I selected a $60 yellow crayon and we went home. It stayed a few years in my room, complementing the navy blue laminate furniture I'd get a year or two later to replace. Then it was no longer fun--but could a giant non-functioning plastic crayon ever be FUN fun?--and I gave it away.

Think Big! disappeared sometime in the 90s but its idea strikes me as archetypally SoHo, lending me another good reason to start with 390. It sold items that both were amusing Pop-Art comments on the everyday, and quite excellent corporate gifts appropriate for clients during holidays. Arty commerce and commercial art, ironized consumerism and unironized consumerism: it fits in well with SoHo's own overall historical trajectory from artist lofts to retail chains. I'll talk more about that in future posts, presumably.

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.

78a. 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



There were hills and swamps here, once. Britain took the land as if it could be taken, as empires are wont to do. Queen Anne gave it to Trinity Church, who leased it to British major Abraham Mortier. On this property, he built an estate called Richmond Hill, one author describing it as a "stately mansion, with its lofty chambers and beautiful mahogany staircases, raising its graceful portico of Ionic columns against a background of splendid oaks and cedars." When Mortier became the enemy during the Revolutionary War, George Washington seized it; this is was where he lived on July 4, 1776. When we won, Richmond Hill became John and Abagail Adams' mansion during John's tenure as Vice President. After the nation's capital moved south to DC, the property was owned by poor, sweet, doomed Aaron Burr, he of an infamous duel with Alexander Hamilton that fills an uncertain space in the school-taught minds of Americans. Burr made attempts at developing the space, but after the duel he was shit out of luck, and his creditors sold everything to John Jacob Astor, already mindbogglingly rich. He put the mansion on logs, and rolled it down the hill and out of the way. It carried on for a while. Sometimes it was a theater, and sometimes an opera house--a fashionable and respectable thing in those Rossini-tormented days-- eventually devolving into a saloon and, in 1849, rubble.

Except not completely rubble. When some of the surrounding streets were being widened in 1913, workers discovered fragments of the mansion had been subject to re-use. A gentleman by the name of George H. Brennan is quoted by the New York Times as saying:

"A part of the old theatre must have been used for the rear of the stable, for on some of the beams were evidences of ancient painting or fresco work, which, perhaps, formed a part of the old theatre decorations. People used to go to the stable to see these faded decorations and the proprietor always said that his horses occupied a section of the theatre as altered from Aaron Burr's residence."

Then, after this amazing discovery, this unearthing of a rare fragment from Revolutionary New York...they demolished it for good. Of course. Did somebody at least take photos of the damned thing?

I'll talk about the homes that replaced Richmond Hill next week.

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.