Butterick Building ca. 1939 The Butterick company's success in producing both patterns and fashion magazines resulted in another big venture: the construction in 1903 of the Butterick Building at the corner of MacDougal (now Sixth Avenue) and Spring Streets. They commissioned the firm of Horgan & Slattery to design their new headquarters. The 15-story Beaux Arts style building became the jewel in the crown of the Butterick empire at the beginning of the 20th century. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but a 15-story building in Manhattan would have been quite a commanding presence in 1903 (it’s no coincidence that the shock of such “skyscrapers” ultimately led to the passing of the city’s first zoning law in 1916). The Fuller Company, engineers of the iconic 22-story Flatiron Building going up at the same time, also built the Butterick Building. Standing at the head of Spring Street, the Butterick Building remains today a visual gateway to the Hudson Square neighborhood. Recently, when the City proposed to rezone Hudson Square to encourage new high-rise residential development, GVSHP asked that height limits for new construction be limited to 210 feet, about the height of the Butterick Building. The City ultimately opted for the more excessive 290 feet. Sparing no expense, when built, the interiors of the Butterick Building were designed by Tiffany. The building, marketed as “The Home of the Delineator Family,” operated 86 printing presses that produced Butterick’s 32 periodicals, which made it one of the largest magazine publishing companies in the country. With such a large floor area, the building accommodated a large range of activities, from seamstresses making sample garments to workers printing and shipping sewing pattern envelopes. But just what was The Delineator? The Butterick Publishing Company’s cultural and social significance was not limited to its home sewing patterns; it also created one of the most successful publications the country had ever seen: The Delineator. First created to help advertise Butterick sewing patterns in 1873, The Delineator ultimately became a champion of “the new woman” in the post-Civil War era. Finding herself balancing roles in and outside the home for the first time in history, the middle-class woman was the prime subscriber of Butterick’s magazine. With printing moving to the Butterick Building, the readership went from 30,000 in 1876 to 480,000 by the turn of the century, and by 1920 it climbed to over one million. It lasted until 1937. Butterick was located in this building until October 2001 when they were purchased by the McCall Pattern Company and were moved uptown to Penn Plaza, according to a former employee who now works for McCall’s. Even though they’re now gone, we’re glad to see this monument to women’s history still standing tall at its prominent spot on Sixth Avenue and Spring Street.

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.

Doherty's Hotel, 342 West Street, at the foot of West Houston Street opposite Pier 39; October 25, 1927. This westernmost portion of Houston Street (at left) was known as Hammersley Street until at least 1858, when the two streets were connected. The vacant lots either side of the hotel were formerly occupied by the Church of the Holy Comforter (West Houston Street, at left) and the Seamen's Church Institute at 341-340 West Street (at right, with diner car). Photographer P.L. Sperr notes "the hotel itself will have to go in 1930" (it's unclear if Sperr's note was contemporaneous). The hotel was purchased by the New York Central Railroad in 1930, and was soon razed. Today, the site is part of 550 Washington Street, better known as the St. John's Freight Terminal. The massive warehouse served as the southern terminus of New York's Central's West Side freight line (the High Line).

55 Thompson Street, ca. 2006. The Tunnel Garage was built in 1922 during the early automobile age, ushering in the engineering marvel of its time, the Holland Tunnel. GVSHP sought landmark designation for the building, but the City refused, and it was demolished in 2006

84 King Street, December 7, 1927. Built in the 1920s and replacing five old houses, no. 84 (at right) was constructed as a two-story parking garage. It functioned in that capacity for a number of decades. The address, though, is best known as the Paradise Garage, a night club opened between 1977 and 1987, whose patrons were predominantly African American gay men. The state-of-the-art sound system installed in the club was considered the best in New York at the time. The club was the base for DJ Larry Levan, a cult favorite who style and musical productions are considered the precursor of modern house music. The club was not open to the general public and they served no food or alcohol, meaning it was not limited to bar hours and often stayed open all night and into the next day. The club closed in September 1987, a few months before its owner, Michael Brody, died of complications from HIV/AIDS. Today the building is occupied by a Verizon Communications facility, though the club is still remembered and mourned by those who attended its infamous parties.

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.

Thanksgiving Ragamuffins, 1933. A little girl applying lipstick, at 367 Hudson Street, west side, between King and West Houston Streets. November 30, 1933.

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.

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.

Under demolition, 1936.

Spring Street facade of 150 Varick Street, through the plots at 14-37 Dominick Street, ca. 1935.

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.

Paradise Garage was a semi-underground club focused solely on music and dance. Unlike many other clubs at the time, it was membership only – not open to the general public. Moreover, it did not discriminate among its membership based on race, class, or sexual identity. Sole proprietor Michael Brody, with financial backing from former boyfriend Mel Cheren, opened the club in 1977 as the 84 King Street Garage with a series of “construction” parties as the renovations continued for a year. DJ Larry Levan (born Lawrence Philpot) worked with Richard Long of Richard Long & Associates to develop, design, and assemble the award-winning sound system that was considered the best in New York. It officially opened as the Paradise Garage on January 28, 1978. Only open on weekends, patrons entered the club through a first-floor garage door entrance and walked up a long ramp to the second floor. The 10,000-square-foot space was divided into a 5,000-square-foot dance floor, which could accommodate 2,000 people, and a 2,000-square-foot lounge. The club served no alcohol – or food – allowing it to stay open after bar hours, often until noon the next morning. Levan chose records that sustained all-night dance marathons and changed the sound of dance music. Songs he played soon showed up on the radio and were featured at New York’s Vinylmania Records. His musical influence spread to dance clubs across the United States and Europe, and is recognized as a precursor to house music. The building was demolished in 2018.

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.

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.

Intersection of Sullivan and Broome Streets, and the newly-extended Sixth Avenue, 1932. The three-story house closest to the corner (at center) is No. 57 Sullivan Street, wood-frame rowhouse built in 1817 for mason David G. Bogert. The house was originally two-and-a-half stories, in the Federal style, with dormer windows above a simple cornice. In 1858, current owners added a third story and extended the facade’s Flemish bond brickwork to a new wooden cornice. In 1932, the demolition of an adjacent building exposed the house’s wooden frame (as captured in Charles Von Urban’s photo. The house was restored after 1995 and designated a New York City Landmark in 2009 — some 39 years after its original proposal.

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.

Post here.

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.

This one got a very liberal application of lipstick. The location is 381 Hudson Street, in the same block. Notice the NRA Blue Eagle in the window; these had just come in that fall. November 30, 1933.

\#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.