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.