Today it’s a stylish clothing boutique. In the 1990s it housed a Thai restaurant. In the early 20th century, it was a hotel called Laux’s.
But whatever business occupies 417 Bleecker Street at the corner of Bank Street, it can’t beat the remarkable role the building played during the early 19th century—when it was called “The Barracks” and held more than 100 British POWs captured during the War of 1812.
You could say that New York lucked out during that military conflict, which lasted until 1815.
The city prepared for combat by putting up fortifications like Castle Clinton at the Battery and blockhouses in what became Central Park. Luckily, the British never attacked.
Yet this war also played out far overseas. “On the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1813, at the height of the War of 1812, the U.S.S. Hornet, an 18-gun warship, set its sights on a British sloop anchored on the Demerara River in Guyana, South America,” wrote Eric Ferrara in The Villager.
It took minutes for the men on the Hornet to sink the British ship, the H.M.S. Peacock (described not as a sloop but a man-of-war in the Historical Guide to the City of New York, published in 1909).
The Americans then rescued more than one hundred British seamen, recounted a 1918 article in the Daughters of the American Revolution magazine. “On reaching the city, [the British sailors] were taken straight to ‘The Barracks’ at Bleecker Street and confined there till peace was declared,” the article stated.
Interestingly, the Daughters noted that the Americans didn’t treat the British as awful as they treated our POWs during the Revolutionary War, when thousands of men were starved on prison ships in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay.
After the war was relegated to history and the sailors presumably freed, the passage of time changed the building that no one called The Barracks anymore.
“In 1901 the remains of this structure, which had been used as a private residence with a store at street level, was converted to the Laux Hotel, named after the owner,” states 1969’s Greenwich Village Historic District Designation Report.
“By the late 1930s, the building had been modified still further, faced with brick, and raised from three to four stories.”
Not much of the original Barracks is left in the modernized building. But some remnants of the prison exist here, unmarked and largely unknown.
[Third image: via The Villager; Fourth image: NYC Dept. of Records Photo Gallery, 1980s tax photo]
Tags: Bank Street NYC, Bleecker Street history, Bleecker Street NYC, Greenwich Village prison, New York City War of 1812, old prisons New York City, prisoners of war in NYC, things you never knew about New York
Ephemeral New York 
September 5, 2016 at 9:41 am |
I remember eating at the Thai restarunt! and before that it was a store that sold light fixtures, back in the 70’s
September 5, 2016 at 2:56 pm |
Wow, I lived down the street from this building for years and never knew its history, it is much older than the surrounding buildings built in the 1820’s and ’30s. I ate at the Thai restaurant often, it was quite good. But don’t get me started on all the designer stores along there, it completely ruined Bleecker street, one of my favorite streets growing up there
September 5, 2016 at 4:47 pm |
Bleecker Street’s change into Marc Jacobs-land has been well documented, so I tried not to get into it here. But yes, the boutique-ification of Bleecker just keeps going.
September 8, 2016 at 5:54 pm |
[…] A Bank Street Building Once Held Prisoners of War [Ephemeral NY] […]
May 25, 2017 at 5:46 am |
[…] seem to have any connection to New York City. But the city has its War of 1812 remnants, some of which still exist today (even though New York was never […]