Used to be that ships and hurricanes were typically named after women.
And it seems that tenement and prewar developers used the same tradition when they named New York’s residential buildings.
The surviving monikers are a glimpse into the favored female names of the era.
The Sylvia is a six-story building at 59 West 76th Street. So who was Sylvia?
No one knows for sure, but one theory is that the name comes from Shakespeare’s heroine in “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”
Anastasia Court, built in 1926, is on Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge.
The Florence is another old-world beauty out in Bay Ridge. It’s not the only Florence in the city.
There’s a Florence walk-up tenement at 128 Second Avenue at St. Marks Place and another on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
And this Morningside Heights tenement, The Bertha, isn’t the only Bertha in Manhattan. There’s another in Harlem.
Bertha and Florence: Clearly two very popular chick names back in 1900!
Tags: Anastasia Court Bay Ridge, apartment building names, female names buildings, girls names tenements, New York City tenements, tenement names, The Bertha, The Florence, The Sylvia 76th Street
Ephemeral New York 
September 20, 2012 at 4:44 am |
Question: Is there a way to post this blog on Facebook? I love it!! Alma Carey..
September 20, 2012 at 5:31 am |
Thank you! We’re on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ephemeral-New-York/108434709206250
September 20, 2012 at 3:39 pm |
How lovely! It’s funny, when I saw the title to this post I was thinking of some grimy old tenements with the obscure names of ‘notorious’ women haphazardly carved around the buildings like a High school bathroom! LOL
September 20, 2012 at 3:43 pm |
Ooh, I like that–old-school graffiti, bad girls of another era!
September 20, 2012 at 8:40 pm |
My grandmother’s name was Florence and her older sister was Bertha. Florence was born in 1887.
September 21, 2012 at 2:58 pm |
Any particular reason they put THE in front of the name?
September 23, 2012 at 12:01 am |
There were two buildings near the Plaza in Brooklyn named Margaret and Elizabeth built by William H. Reynolds ca. 1900. I’m pretty sure they were named for his daughters. I would imagine most of these were named for some family member of the builders.
September 24, 2012 at 11:14 am |
I recall, when I was a student at CCNY, I used to pass a row of several houses on W 135th Street, east of Broadway, where each house had a girl’s name. The only one I still remember is “Corinne”.
January 7, 2013 at 4:56 am |
[…] Helen Court sounds like a soft, peaceful tenement. It’s in Harlem near 125th Street. Helen was a popular name about a century ago. Who was Helen—the developer’s wife or daughter? […]
May 13, 2013 at 2:57 am |
[…] notice that when a tenement building has a name, it tends to be female? Bertha, Florence, Rose, Sylvia—names popular at the turn of the last century, when so many tenements were built, are etched […]