This is the longest video that I’ve ever made, but it’s a good one. Today marks the 249th anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, the largest of the entire war and the most catastrophic for the Americans. The Battle was also the first that took place after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. After George Washington was able to force the British out of Boston in the early summer of 1776, he knew that their next target was likely New York. He marched his army south and began preparations for an invasion. His hunch was a good one, as British high command deemed New York their most strategic priority. With its large port, a substantial number of loyalists as well as the ability to control the Hudson River, they would be able to effectively cut off the New England Colonies and strangle the revolution. By August, the first of the British fleet began to appear in New York Harbor. In total, the fleet would number over 400 ships and 32,000 troops. This was the largest amphibious invasion mounted by the British in their history. By August 22nd, troops began disembarking in Gravesend. Washington, assuming that this was a feint and that the actual invasion would take place in Manhattan, split his army, which would be his undoing. In the early morning hours of August 27th, fighting began around modern-day Green-Wood Cemetery. When the day was done, the Americans were badly beaten and huddling in Brooklyn Heights. Washington would be able to evacuate the entire army across the East River in one night, allowing him to live to fight another day. However, this decision would leave New York in British hands until the end of the war in 1783. There are a variety of monuments around Brooklyn where you can visit different parts of the battle. New York tends to get overlooked in terms of revolutionary history because of this defeat, but it’s an incredibly important part of this nations founding.
This landmark is an example of something that was lost but brought back from the dead. This is Gage and Tollner on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn. The restaurant first opened in 1879 and moved to this circa 1875 Greek Revival townhouse in 1882. Over its history, it was one of the most popular restaurants in Brooklyn and in its heyday was a hotspot for the city’s high society. It has been under multiple different owners over its history, each preserving both the restaurant and the interior, which is also a New York City landmark. Unfortunately, in 2004, the restaurant closed, part of the building was converted into offices, and various fast-casual chains moved in, including TGI Fridays and Arby’s. The space was purchased and restored in 2019 and was about to reopen under its original name but was delayed by the pandemic. It officially reopened in 2021. The exterior of Gage and Tollner was landmarked on November 12th, 1974, and the interior was landmarked a year later on March 25th, 1975.
In this edition of Names of New York we’re exploring the multiple names of Greenwich Village. Let me know what name you’d like to learn more about next time.
This unassuming building on Chambers Street has a deceptively long history. It was constructed as a three-story home in 1832 for a man named Samuel Thompson, who was a prominent builder in the area. It was a home for almost 30 years when, in 1862, the city purchased it and turned it into a police station. This would see the building increase in size to five stories. It would serve alternately as a police station and hospital until the late 1800s when it was converted yet again into the Firehouse for Engine Company 29, which you can still see on the facade. It would remain a fire station until 1947. It was sold in the 1960s and converted into a mixed-use building, which it remains to this day. It was landmarked on June 28th, 2016.
41 South Elliott Place is most likely the oldest building on its street. It was built in 1855 south of Fort Greene Park. We have very little information on the actual building apart from its construction date. We don’t know who it was built for, but we do know that this is what the neighborhood would have looked like in the mid-1800s. While homes like these would be used as farmhouses in other neighborhoods, this house was most likely just a speculative residential property, similar to other ones in Fort Greene. 41 South Elliott Place was landmarked as a part of the Fort Greene Historic District on September 26th, 1978.
I was very fortunate this week to get a private tour of Lyndhurst on the banks of the Hudson in Tarrytown. They don’t normally allow filming inside, but they let me, and I’m taking you around on a little virtual tour. The mansion was built in two phases by architect Alexander Jackson Davis, beginning in 1838. Brooklynites may be familiar with one of his other commissions, the Litchfield Villa in Prospect Park. During the Gilded Age, the home was purchased by robber baron Jay Gould, whose family preserved it and donated it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The mansion is open for tours and has a great exhibit on the works of Davis.
On September 19th, I’m going to be doing my Gilded Age Upper East Side walking tour for Charity. I’m doing this for my daughter Emery who was born still at 39 weeks in February of 2023. The people at Push Pregnancy were an amazing resource for my wife and I as we navigated the most tragic event of our lives. If you’d like to join us and donate to a good cause you can book the tour on my website. It will be under my Gilded Age option at 3pm on 9/19. All proceeds including tips will go directly to Push Pregnancy to help raise awareness on ways to stop preventable pregnancy loss as well as supporting those going through it. I’d like to thank them and the many of you who have helped and continue to help me through this. And if you see this and have experienced this loss and need someone to talk to, my DMs are always open.
As two of nine remaining stable buildings on West 18th Street, No. 126 & 128 bring a new meaning to “unique New York.” They were both built in 1864 for the well to do residential district that was developing in the area. Both were originally used to store horse and carriages for wealthy families. 126 Was owned for a time by Archibald Gracie King, a wealthy banker and relative of the Gracie Mansion namesake. Both buildings would remain stables until the turn of the Century when they would be converted for heavy industry, 128 became a warehouse for paper and 126 was owned by Otis Elevator. In fact there was a tower constructed above the building to test elevators which has since been removed. Today the buildings are home to Portale restaurant. This photo was taken during Covid when they were owned by a roofing company. They were both landmarked on December 11th, 1990.
George Rives was a bit of a Renaissance man. He was a lawyer and assistant Secretary of State, and served as a board member for Columbia University, various hospitals, the Astor Library, the Lenox Library, and eventually the New York Public Library. It would make sense then that he would hire the firm of Carrère and Hastings, who were in the process of building the main branch of the library, to construct his townhouse in 1907. Located on 79th between Park and Madison Avenues, construction on the Rives residence wrapped up in 1908. It was designed after Parisian townhouses built on the Place Vendôme. In 1926, the Rives would sell the home to the Gerry family, who would stay there until 1956 when it was sold to the then Kingdom of Greece. It has been used as the Greek Consulate since then. The George Rives Residence was landmarked on May 19th, 1981.
Happy to announce my early fall lineup of tours including my new Park Slope tour. Tickets are available on my website or through my profile. I’ll also be doing a charity tour with @pushpregnancy on 9/19 to raise money for still birth awareness. More details on that to come.
This is another excerpt from my book Hidden Landmarks of New York available wherever books are sold. Roosevelt Island has had more names over its history than a neighborhood undergoing gentrification. During Dutch rule it was known as Hog Island (translated from Varkens Eyelandt), then Blackwell’s Island. In the early 1900s it earned the nickname Welfare Island, and most recently Roosevelt Island. This is the farmhouse of James Blackwell, the owner of the island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Blackwell had inherited the island and used it for agriculture. In 1796 he built his house, which was one of a half dozen buildings on the island at the time. New York City purchased the island in 1828 and built a penitentiary on it. Eventually the island would house prisons, a smallpox sanitorium, psychiatric hospitals, and an assortment of other undesirable institutions. It’s no wonder people stopped beating around the bush and just referred to it as Welfare Island. At the end of the twentieth century, the island underwent another transformation, this time more residential, with multiple apartment buildings sprouting up along the island’s spine and some of the other landmarks being repurposed as lobbies for luxury developments. The house fell into disrepair until the late 1960s, when it underwent a full renovation under the advice of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Blackwell House was landmarked on March 23, 1976.
Murray Hill might be the butt of jokes about New York City neighborhoods but it has a long rich history, and only recently in the grand scheme of things, seems to be the continuation of a Big 10 frat house. The area derives its name from the estate of James and Mary Murray which would see a lot of action during the Revolutionary war. It would then be a hot spot for Gilded Age families to build their mansions. If you found this interesting let me know what neighborhood you’d like to learn more about next.
This building at 433 Broome Street in Soho is deceptively old. It was built in 1827 as a townhouse, probably similar to what 129 Spring Street looks like, which you can see in the second picture. Its developer was Lambert Suydam, who was building in what was effectively the suburbs of New York at the time. In the mid-1800s, Soho began to convert from a residential to a heavily commercial area, and the home at 433 was no exception. Its attic was raised to add an additional story, and its facade was replaced with a very fashionable cast iron one in 1868. The man who converted the building was interesting in his own right; his name was William O’Brien, Earl of Inchiquinn in Ireland, who lost his title because he was a Catholic. He immigrated to the United States following his loss of nobility at the end of the 18th century and lived at No. 233. In 2010, the building was restored. Today, it is a mixed-use building with apartments and retail. It was landmarked as part of the Soho Cast Iron Historic District on August 14th, 1973.
Certain neighborhoods of New York might remind you of being on a street corner in Paris, a market in Italy, or a restaurant in China, but few places make you feel like you’ve left your time period entirely. The Cloisters is one of those places, perched on four acres of Fort Tryon Park, surrounded by untouched forest looking out onto the Hudson and the Palisades. The view from here is not much different from what Henry Hudson saw when he first sailed up the river that now bears his name. This was completely by design. The Cloisters is the branch of the Metropolitan Museum focusing on medieval art. The Met purchased the initial collection from George Bernard with the help of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who not only bought it outright but bought the land for Ft. Tryon Park and the museum. He also bought the land across the river in New Jersey to prevent development from spoiling the museum’s view. The Cloisters is a mix of different medieval architectural styles and even includes the full apse of a church from Spain integrated into the building, which is currently on long-term loan. The Cloisters was landmarked by the City of New York on March 19th, 1974.
For decades, St. Marks Place in the East Village was a grungy hub of counterculture in New York City. It wasn’t always that way; it used to be one of the most fashionable and wealthy areas in the city in the early 19th century. This house at 20 St. Marks was known as the Daniel LeRoy House. It was built in 1832 as part of a development of 3 1/2-story buildings on both sides of the street. Only 3 of these houses still remain. LeRoy was a South Street Seaport merchant who married into the Stuyvesant and Fish families. In more recent years, it’s been home to bars, an art studio, and a co-op on the second floor. It was landmarked on November 19th, 1969.
Not every building has an interesting history. There’s not a famous person or story behind this one. What it did do, though, is usher in a whole new style of architecture. You might think this is in SoHo, but it’s actually in Tribeca, a few blocks from City Hall. The Cary Building was built in 1857 for the company of Cary, Howard, and Sanger. It was a warehouse and dry-goods store, something akin to an early department store. See all those columns on the front? Those were forged of cast iron. This new design method made it cheaper to produce bigger buildings with more ornate designs. This trend would be used in mass quantities later on in SoHo. The Cary Building is on Church Street, taking up the entire block between Chambers and Reade Street. It was landmarked on December 8th, 1992.
I’ve been putting a lot of old buildings on this page that have been converted into luxury condos, but how about the opposite? How about a former mansion turned into a shop and regular apartments? Well, that’s what happened to 271 West 72nd Street. It was built in 1895 by architect Gilbert Schellenger for owner Spencer Aldrich. I’m unsure if it was a speculative development or built for Aldrich himself. What’s unique about this house for the time was that more often than not, developments would include multiple versions of the same home in a row. This house was a single development, so none of the surrounding buildings looked like it. At some point, it was subdivided into apartments and altered to include a storefront on the 72nd Street side. It was landmarked as a part of the West End Collegiate Historic District Extension on June 25th, 2013.
Trinity Church was, and still is, one of the largest landowners in New York City. Thanks to a grant from Queen Anne in 1704, the church received over 200 acres of land in Manhattan, comprising much of the West Village. Trinity would go on to provide long-term leases for developers willing to build on it, an ownership model more akin to what you would find in a trailer park today. That’s what makes this building particularly unique. 66 Morton Street was built in 1852 on land owned by Trinity, but it wasn’t a long-term lease; it was built specifically for the Trustees of the Church. It’s unclear what the home was used for; St. Luke’s in the Field, which was a few blocks north, was an outpost of the Parish but had its own parish house. In addition to its owners, its design stands out. Most townhouses in New York don’t have this large, protruding, rounded front to it; it is a design that would be more at home in Boston than Manhattan. The positioning of the front windows allowed for both more natural light and to get a view of the comings and goings on the street. In more recent history, the home has been a favorite filming location for directors, with it appearing in Working Girl, The Night We Never Met, and Autumn in New York. In 2015, it sold for a whopping $17 million and underwent extensive renovations in 2019. It was landmarked as part of the Greenwich Village Historic District on April 29th, 1969.
Rensselaerwyck was a strange quirk of New York history. A fiefdom within the colony of New Netherland, New York, and the State of New York, it was owned and ruled by one family, the Van Rensselaers. The family was able to make and enforce its own laws, take rent and a percentage of all crops grown on the land as well as tie some tenants to the land, not allowing them to leave the estate. This was all thanks to the Dutch West India Company, who entered into an agreement with Killian Van Rensselaer to help populate their new territory on his dime. Something that he did and micromanaged with an iron fist. This would make the Van Rensselaers one of the richest families in America, with Stephen Van Rensselaer III considered the 10th richest American ever with a fortune estimated to be worth 1/65th of America’s GDP. There would be 10 Patroons that would rule over the area before the tenant laws became so unpopular that the estate was sold off in the 1850s, but that’s over 200 years of a very strange form of government in a democratic society. Was this video an excuse to fly my drone upstate? A bit. Is the history still fascinating? Absolutely.
Lower Fifth Avenue is full of these amazing loft buildings. The level of detail is crazy, for example did you notice the carved figures holding up the sixth story? Possibly my favorite detail about 91 Fifth Avenue though, is that the building’s architect was a guy named Louis Korn, and the developers were brother’s Samuel and Henry Corn. What are the chances. Anyway, the building was a home to publishing throughout its early history. It was home to both Oxford University Press and the Clarendon Press. Today it is a mix of retail and office space with JCrew on the ground floor. It was landmarked as a part of the Ladies Mile Historic District on May 2nd, 1989.