The NoHo Historic District was designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) on June 29, 1999, with the NoHo East Historic District designated in 2003 and expansions to the original district boundaries approved in 2008. This virtual walking tour features 25 buildings within the approximately 130-building original NoHo Historic District, in celebration of its 25th anniversary. The highlighted buildings represent the range of construction periods and array of building types, styles, and uses that occur throughout the district. We encourage you to explore this fascinating stretch of Manhattan virtually, or to use this tour as a jumping-off point as you take your own walk through the historic district! The three-part tour is organized by phases of development, based upon the same categories found within the LPC NoHo Designation Report. Part II includes buildings constructed in the 1870s and 1880s: Cast-Iron-Fronted Buildings in NoHo (Cont'd.) a) 7-9 Bond Street b) 622-624 and 626 Broadway (aka 156-158 Crosby Street) Post-Civil War Expansion c) 10-20 Astor Place (aka 444 Lafayette Street) d) 668-674 Broadway, the Brooks Brothers Store Commercial Development in the 1880s e) 393-399 Lafayette Street (aka 21-23 East 4th Street), De Vinne Press Building f) 628-630 Broadway (aka 160-164 Crosby Street), The New York Mercantile Exchange g) 644-646 Broadway (aka 71-73 Bleecker Street) h) 9 Great Jones Street i) 687-691 Broadway (aka 250-254 Mercer Street) \-- To return to Part I of the tour, click here. To progress to Part III of the tour, click here.

Robbins & Appleton Building, ca. 1980. The original 1871 Robbins & Appleton building at 1 Bond Street was destroyed in a massive fire in 1877. The six-story watch company headquarters and factory was a complete loss, but the company rehired the building's architect, Stephen D. Hatch, to rebuild the cast-iron fronted, mansard-roofed structure. The watch company moved out of the building in 1892 enacting a peculiar leaving ritual. Because they worked with gold in the manufacturing of the watches, after vacating the space, they hired a salvage firm to remove and burn all of the wood interior features. After processing the ash through a chemical wash the result was more than $65,000 in gold. The building's tenants for most of the 20th century were garment manufacturers. In the mid 1970s artists began moving into the large loft-style spaces and the building was converted to co-ops in 1989.

1 Bond Street ca. 1975 Located at 1-5 Bond Street near Broadway, the Robbins & Appleton Building is a prime example of the remarkable cast iron architecture that one can find throughout NoHo and up and down Broadway. The building is both an individual New York City landmark and included within the city’s NoHo Historic District. At street level, this building looks like many other cast-iron commercial buildings in the area, but a glance upwards reveals a striking mansard roof. Perched at the very top of the building below the central pediment is a gold clock that reflects some of the building’s history. It was in 1871 that merchants and manufacturers Henry A. Robbins and Daniel Fuller Appleton hired architect Stephen Decatur Hatch to design a new building to house their American Waltham Watch Company, which was a noted manufacturer of watches and watch cases. Located on Bond Street, this new commercial building reflected the transformation of the street from a fashionable residential enclave during the early part of the nineteenth century to a commercial and manufacturing center by the mid-to-late 1800s. Hatch’s 1871 building had a short life, as on the night of March 6, 1877 a massive fire destroyed the structure. Robbins and Appleton again sought out Hatch to create a replacement, a grand Second Empire style factory building which was constructed between 1879 and 1880. As the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission notes, “the present building, erected two years after the fire, is a stylistic variation on the \[commercial] palace theme. Although designed by the same architect in the same style with the same façade material for the same clients as the 1871 building and retaining such features as the mansard roof, the function of the new building was different. The new building was to serve as a factory with the exception of some floor space which was leased to D. Appleton & Co., the notable book publishing firm. Lush and intricate architectural embellishment was unnecessary on a utilitarian structure such as a factory. With the exception of the ground floor, roof, and shallow end pavilions which give the building its Second Empire character—unusual for this date and probably retained at the insistence of the client—the façade consists of a single window bay unit reproduced twelve times across each of the upper four floors in disciplined regularity. The bay unit is a deeply recessed one-over-one double-hung window flanked by smooth columns with simple necking and stylized capitals carrying a shouldered arch. The strength and beauty of the building lie in the strong horizontals of the cornices above each floor and the three-dimensional quality created by the deeply recessed windows.” The American Waltham Watch company left the space by the turn of the twentieth century, replaced by a variety of small-scale manufacturing and commercial firms. Converted to residential use in the late 1980s, the building stands as a majestic anchor to the architecturally eclectic Bond Street.