70. Fraunces Tavern

Location: 54 Pearl Street
Built: 1719; reconstruction and renovation, 1904-07
Architect: Unknown; William H. Mersereau (reconstruction)
National Register Number: 08000140
Listed: March 6, 2008
Visited: August 5, 2007 and May 24, 2008



Didn't I cover Fraunces Tavern already? I DID.

Wasn't it already placed on the National Register of Historic Places? WHY YES IT WAS--as one of sixteen buildings within the Fraunces Tavern Block historic district, anyway. You'd think that the National Park Service wouldn't need to re-landmark it as an individual building, but crazily enough, maybe because of the hundredth anniversary of its reconstruction, Fraunces Tavern wound up on this week's NRHP action list with OMG a new number and a new listing date and...

Yes, this is boring. You don't have to care. Whatever your reasons for viewing this blog, or just this blog entry, it's probably not because you're interested in the curatorial minutiae of an arcane bureaucratic construct like the National Register of Historic Places. I don't care that much myself, except when such minutiae informs my blog's content. And since I'm being very bloody-minded about this project, since every individual Manhattan listing on the NRHP gets at least one blog entry and at least one picture--no exceptions, no elisions, no cheating--Fraunces Tavern gets another entry.

I have nothing to add to my previous entry. Didn't bother actually going inside the museum again, or eat at the restaurant, as I am still childishly peeved at my reception there last year. It didn't need my business, though. It received waves of tourists for the Memorial Day weekend, some of whom were all set to walk right through me, a stationary object with a camera, until some firings in their reptilian brain stem fired at the last possible second.