Madison Avenue and 39th Street, Looking North; Changing New York
The Victorian Pyne Mansion on Madison Avenue with the tall tower of 22 East 40th Street in the background.
Museum of the City of New YorkMadison Avenue skyscrapers, surrounding a brownstone mansion at 39th Street, July 2, 1936.
The brownstone building once belonged to Moses Taylor Pyne, the financier and philanthropist who was a benefactor of Princeton University. After Pyne’s death in 1921, his widow Margaretta S. Pyne continued to live there. In a 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article detailing the sale of Madison Avenue dwellings, Mrs. Pyne “is reported to have confided to her friends, ‘I will never give up this house.’”
Eventually, the house was sold and demolished. The current yellow-brick structure on the site was built in 1949.
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