86 Second Avenue Building Date : 1874 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : John McCullough Original Architect : Johnathan A. Remer Description & Building Alterations This five-story Italianate tenement building was constructed in 1874 at the cross of Second Avenue and East 5th Street. The ground floor has held a cafe/restaurant since the building’s construction. The Wiener Cafe House occupied the ground level in the late 19th century (see sidebar). Its facade features a modillioned cornice, rusticated brownstone quoins at the building corners, molded galvanized-iron window lintels and bracketed sills. The storefront underwent a major alteration in 1928. A new residential entrance has been cut through the East 5th Street facade and the historic entrance with entablature on the same facade was converted into the storefront.

84 Second Avenue, date unknown. A survivor of a time when many storefronts had the two-story glass fronted facade seen here, 84 Second Avenue has a long and somewhat mysterious history. In the late 19th century the building was Irene Stenard's Temporary Home for Women, a boarding house for working poor women. The address became well known in 1887 when Nellie Brown (the pseudonym of investigative reporter Nellie Bly) checked into this facility before feigning insanity for the purpose of being committed to the institution on Blackwell's Island. The resulting report was published as the scandalous 'Ten Days in a Madhouse.' At some point, likely in the early 20th century, the glass storefront and wooden ornamentation at the roofline were added when it became a commercial space. For many years in the mid-century, the storefront was occupied by a shop that sold tuxedos and formal wear. In 1974 it was the venue of a brutal murder; 40-year-old seamstress Helen Sopolsky was found bludgeoned to death on the second floor. Following the event, the space was abandoned just as it was, supposedly with the fingerprinting dust still marking the furniture. The Sopolsky family is said to still own the building. Though someone it said to have lived on the top floor, the lower floors are a conspicuously empty space. As the neighborhood has revived and boomed in the last few decades, the permanently unlit and dusty 'DRESS FOR HIRE' neon sign has remained unchanged.

\[Little girl playing with water from fire hydrant.]