The demolition of St. John's Chapel, designed in 1803 for Trinity Parish, helped spark public discussion about the role of preservation in New York City. The elegantly spired chapel on Varick Street in today's Tribeca once overlooked a private park in an exclusive residential neighborhood. Around 1900, with the park converted to a railroad freight yard, and church attendance dwindling, Trinity announced the chapel's demolition. The outcry from New Yorkers, including preservation champion and Manhattan Borough President George McAneny, delayed any action for nearly two decades, but plans to widen Varick Street to make way for the Seventh Avenue subway led to the ultimate demolition of the chapel in 1918.

Showing a portion of St. John's Chapel and the church yard. The church and the 3-story house adjoining it have been demolished and its site is now (1937) occupied by station V of the United States Post Office.

Ericsson House, ca, 1913. John Ericsson was a 19th century Swedish-American inventor and mechanical engineer whose most well-known work was in the field of transportation vessels, including the steam locomotive and naval ships. Ericsson designed the USS Monitor, an ironclad warship built in Brooklyn and tested in the line of fire at the Civil War Battle of Hampton Roads. In 1864 he purchased the Federal style home on Beach Street, which at the time faced the southern boundary of St. John’s Park. The house was decorated with marble steps, the carved door- casings and fan-lights, the massive mahogany fittings (according to a description in a 1890 Ericsson biography). Ericsson died in 1889 and the home remained through the start of the 20th century. Originally surrounded by other fashionable homes in the early 1800s, by his death it was neighbors to factories and a freight railroad. In 1920 the house was demolished for a single story garage. The street where the home was located, Beach Street between Hudson and Varick Streets, was renamed Ericsson Place after the inventor in the 1920s. Around that same time, the whole north side of this block (the former site of the private square for St. John's Chapel) was razed for the curved exit roadway from the Holland Tunnel.

St. John's Chapel was designed by John McComb, Jr., in 1803 for the vestry of Trinity Church to accommodate its expanding Episcopalian congregation and to serve Trinity's planned real estate subdivision around it's newly-created St. John's Park. The chapel's hewn-oak spire reached more than two hundred feet in height, while a curved stairway to the pulpit and carved fluted pillars lent elegance to its airy, open interior. The original location of this church was one of the most attractive in New York. It stood on the eastern side of St. John's Park whose tree-shaded walks were a favorite recreational spot for the well-to-do residents of the neighborhood. But, in the second half of the 18th century, as the fashionable moved uptown and Trinity sold the park to Cornelius Vanderbilt for construction of a freight terminal, what had been a neighborhood of patrician townhouses became slovenly and ramshackle. By the 1890’s, most of the congregation had left and Trinity wanted to sell St. John’s Chapel. Holdouts at St. John’s — including the pastor, the Rev. Dr. Philip A. H. Brown, known as the Fighting Vicar — resisted the parent church. Dr. Brown died in 1909, the year that pro-demolition candidates won a vestry election at Trinity. In 1912, the City decided to widen Varick Street. In response to protests from architects and historians, a proposal to save the Chapel would have run the sidewalk and part of the street under the columns of the portico, which would be allowed to jut out into traffic. Ignoring the New York Times' editorial opinion that "to destroy it would be vandalism", Trinity Church decided to demolish the Chapel and put the site on the market for more than $200,000.

Four-story Sullivan Street loft building, including the Rotisserie Range Co., at No. 26; January 24, 1927. The buildings pictured were razed shortly thereafter to facilitate the downtown extension of Sixth Avenue and the construction of the IND Eighth Avenue Line. The extended avenue opened on September 18, 1930, while the new Eighth Avenue subway commenced service eight days shy of two years later, on September 10, 1932.

176 Franklin Street, ca. 1980. The three-story Franklin Street structure was completed in 1907, replacing a Methodist chapel that had previously occupied the site. The family of Ida May Powell, the owner of the new building, had purchased the adjacent property at the corner of Hudson Street (at right) in 1903, to house their candy manufacturing business. Powell enlisted architect Henri Fouchaux, the architect who had just competed an eleventh-story extension next door, to design the Beaux-Arts building on Franklin Street. The facade was substantially altered in 1916, when another Powell, George, converted the storefront level to a restaurant. The leaded glass windowpanes date to this renovation. The Franklin Inn restaurant became a popular meeting place for the districts produce merchants, while a booster club for produce wholesalers was headquartered in the upper stories. No. 176 Franklin was raided multiple times during Prohibition, with the restaurant and a cabaret operation on the second floor censured by the authorities. In later years, the building was home to small manufacturing operations, which gave way to galleries, residences, and high end retail in more recent decades.

506 Canal Street ARCHITECT: Unknown DATE: 1826 STYLE: Federal This house is part of a rare surviving cluster of early nineteenth-century structures in lower Manhattan on a block partially created on landfill located close to the Hudson River waterfront. It retains distinctive characteristics of the Federal style, including the Flemish bond brickwork, brownstone window sills, and the peaked roof. The most unusual feature is the three-bay cast-iron storefront with semi-elliptical arches, which appears to date from the original construction of the building and is the only known storefront of its kind to survive in New York City.

Hot dog vendor at West and North Moore Streets, April 8, 1936. The tall building in the background is the AT\&T Long Distance building at 32 Sixth Avenue.

Under demolition, 1936.

Spring Street Presbyterian Church ca. 1927 Now the site of a hotel, the Spring Street Presbyterian Church was founded in 1809 and the original building was completed in 1811. It was known for its strong abolitionist stance. The church had a multiracial Sunday school and admitted African-Americans to full communion. Their stance was met with backlash, however, and was burned down twice by the 1830s. In June of 1836, a new brick structure was opened on the site. The Presbytery closed the church in 1963 and in 1966 the building was destroyed by a fire. The site was excavated in 2006 in the process of being cleared for the new Trump SoHo condo hotel, and the church’s former cemetery was uncovered.

Originally, part of Trinity’s “church farm,” St. John’s Park was Trinity Church’s first real estate development project. Conceived in the early 19th century as a square of elegant townhouses, Trinity enclosed the square bounded by Varick, Laight, Hudson, and Beech Streets, built St. John’s Chapel to serve as the parish church, and sold lots around the perimeter, deeding the exclusive use of the square to residents (an example followed years later by Grammercy Square.) By 1827, the neighborhood was fashionable, and the park was landscaped with flowering trees and gardens, but it only lasted a generation. By the middle of the 19th century, the City’s elite citizens were moving uptown. In 1851, when Cornelius Vanderbilt laid tracks for the Hudson River Railroad on the west side of the square, St. John’s Park owners decamped en masse, and the mansions around the square became rooming houses. Trinity had maintained the right to sell the land with the consent of two-thirds of the owners, so in 1866 Trinity sold the park to Vanderbilt for $1 million, split between the church and the lot owners.

The St. John’s Park Freight Depot, built in 1868, was the terminal for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad freight line. At right, the building’s pediment includes a 150-foot bas-relief sculpture surrounding a bronze statue of Vanderbilt himself. The station’s 8 tracks were able to accommodate 96 cars, in turn spurring the construction of new warehouse facilities to store goods bound for points west, either by rail or boat, via the Hudson River piers a few blocks away. The large loft-style former warehouse buildings that make up present-day Tribeca’s housing stock date to this period. In 1927, the terminal was razed to clear the way for the Manhattan-side entrance to the Holland Tunnel. The New York Central Railroad built a new facility, also named St. John’s, at Spring Street.

Showing the lower part of the 3-story house that adjoined the churchyard of St. John's Chapel. It was then known as Trinity Hospital, ca. 1914.

Merchants Refrigerating Company, ca. 1905. Constructed in 1891 as a cold storage warehouse for the Merchants Refrigerating and Ice Manufacture Company, the six -story Romanesque Revival building occupies the entire lot from North Moore Street to Ericsson Place (Beach Street when this building was constructed). Architect Thomas Jackson also designed a number of other industrial buildings in the neighborhood. After 1901 the building supplied its immediate neighbors (in the surrounding two blocks) with cooled brine (a refrigerant liquid). By 1924 the refrigerating company also owned and occupied buildings at 17-19, 27-29, and 31-31 North Moore Street. Both the North Moore Street facade (nos. 35-37 in tan brick) and the Ericsson facade (nos. 30-32 in red brick) retain the carved granite signbands with "Merchants Refrigerating & Ice Manufact. Co." and address numbers. Today the old warehouse included private loft residents and an art gallery at ground level.

The 1898 consolidation of all five boroughs as one unified City of New York brought the population from 2 million to 3.4 million people and intensified the need for more water. In 1905, the City established a Board of Water Supply to plan and build a new system of reservoirs and tunnels that would ensure access to clean water for the growing population. The next year, the Board started planning the Catskill Aqueduct and installed a laboratory at 147 Varick Street to test equipment and building materials, and to analyze water and soil samples. The Board also hired a photographer to document this monumental project, and put the photo lab here to print and store thousands of images.

34-46 Varick Street - Laight Street, Manhattan, NY

289 Hudson Street, 1974. The Half Note Club was one of the premier places to hear jazz in the 1960s, and at least a half-dozen records were “live from the Half Note.” John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderly, Billie Holiday, and Judy Garland all performed here before it became a topless bar in 1974. It’s now a deli.

Just on the edge of Village Preservation’s neighborhoods, this historic firehouse is especially unique because of its size. When it was being built in 1904, the New York Times said it would become “one of the largest fire engine houses in the city.” Designed by architect Edward P. Casey, the iconic large rusticated limestone base supports a beautiful brick facade and elegant windows. In 1987 the city decided the location was no longer needed as an active firehouse. When considering what to do with the building, the Department decided that, because of its size, it would be a perfect home for their museum, then located at 100 Duane Street, which was growing too large for its space. And so they relocated the New York City Fire Museum to Spring Street and opened on July 6th of that year.

\#386 Washington Street shows Lewis DeGroff and Son Wholesale Grocer. There are horse-drawn wagons at the loading dock, loading barrels onto their carts. There are several other business next to DeGroff and Son. 1906.

Intersection of Sullivan and Grand Streets; March 8, 1927. This photo was taken in preparation for the construction of the IND Eighth Avenue line and the extension of Sixth Avenue (the lot at right has already been cleared for the project). Two blocks east, the Grand Street station of the Sixth Avenue El is visible above West Broadway. Today, the intersection of Grand Street, Sullivan Street, and Sixth Avenue is known as Duarte Square, after Juan Pablo Duarte, a founding father of the Dominican Republic (in keeping with Sixth Avenue's 1945 honorific renaming as the "Avenue of the Americas").

Fleming Smith Warehouse ARCHITECT: Stephen Decatur Hatch DATE: 1891-92 STYLE: Neo-Flemish, Romanesque Revival Among its important qualities, the Fleming Smith Warehouse is an architecturally distinguished commercial structure, that it was designed by Stephen Decatur Hatch, a notable New York City architect. The building displays handsome neo-Flemish and Romanesque Revival features such as the striking gabled roof and round-arched windows. The building’s picturesque silhouette complements its architectural character.

Bulldog emblem on the American Express Horse Stables, Hubert Street facade, ca. 1970. The American Express Carriage House was built in 1866 and expanded in 1898 to house the stables of the American Express Company. American Express stagecoaches operated out of this building. For years the company enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the movement of express shipments (goods, securities, currency, etc.) throughout New York State. American Express, today’s multinational financial services company, was created in 1850 by the merger of three express delivery companies: one owned John Butterfield, one by William Fargo and one by Henry Wells. When Butterfield and other directors objected to the proposal that American Express extend its operations to California, Wells and Fargo started Wells Fargo & Co. in 1852. Long after the stagecoaches, the building was the center of NYC nightlife when it housed the nightclubs Heat, B Square, Shelter, Vinyl and, from 1983 to 1987, Area. Area was a themed nightclub that attracted many celebrities. Along with Danceteria and Limelight, Area defined the 1980’s nightclub scene. In 2008, the building was converted to residential condominiums.

74-76 Laight Street, ca. 1979. This ten-story Romanesque Revival loft building was erected in 1899 as a warehouse for Fairchild Bros. and Foster, manufacturers of "digestive ferments & other pharmaceutical products.

Henry J. Meyer warehouse, Laight Street, 1939. During the latter half of the 19th century, the northern portion of present-day Tribeca, between the Hudson River shipping piers and the St. John’s Freight Terminal, developed into Manhattan’s commercial warehousing hub. With a constant stream of goods arriving from international and domestic suppliers, new warehouse operations for a variety of commodities — dry goods, cold storage, etc. — alleviated intermodal bottlenecks, facilitating New York’s growth as a shipping port. Laight Street, the main route between St. John’s and the U.S. Appraiser’s storehouse, was uniquely situated for warehouse development. The five-story Rundbogenstil (a German Romanesque Revival style) warehouse at 54-56 Laight was George W. DaCunha’s second building for Henry J. Meyer, an early proponent of the district’s storage industry. It continued to operate as a warehouse facility under a succession of owners through the 1970s, before conversion to office space in 1988.

Holland Plaza Building ARCHITECT: Ely Jacques Kahn DATE: 1930 STYLE: Modern Classical Holland Plaza Building is an exceptionally fine example of an industrial building in the Modern Classical style. The building was constructed on Canal Street, opposite the entrance to the newly-built Holland Tunnel. It was designed to be read as an industrial building, without extraneous added ornament, but it nevertheless has a decorative scheme that is completely integrated with the skin of the structure.