The many lives of an 1834 wooden Village house

With its steeply pitched roof and side staircase, the house at 6 Weehawken Street might be the most Dorian Gray of Village homes.

Built in 1834, it’s almost unchanged from the way it looked in the mid-19th century.

And all of its various incarnations over two centuries reflect the enormous changes that took place in this part of the West Village, just yards from the Hudson River.

The story of 6 Weehawken Street (also known as 392 West Street, as there’s an entrance on this side as well) begins in the 1830s. That’s when tiny Weehawken Street was created on the former site of Newgate State Prison.

Closed in 1829, Newgate was overcrowded and dangerous, and this waterfront area in the booming village of Greenwich made for attractive real estate.

The city decided to turn the property into a produce, meat, and fish market called Greenwich Market (one of many open-air markets along the Hudson River at the time) bounded by Christopher Street and Amos Street, the 19th century name for today’s West 10th Street.

Weehawken Street was paved, and market buildings in the usual style of the era—open in the front and with projecting eaves to protect the goods for sale from the elements—were constructed.

Six Weehawken is “almost certainly a surviving portion” of a market house, states the Weehawken Street Historic District Report, published in 2006.

The market went bust in 1844, and the buildings were left unoccupied. A boat builder named George Munson bought and renovated number 6 in 1848, adapting it for his boat business and according to some accounts, turning it into a saloon too.

Considering the neighborhood at the time—dockworkers, boat builders, and working class folks who made their living in riverfront factories and the fishing industry—business was probably pretty good.

Six Weehawken continued to change hands. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries (the sketch above on the left shows the building in the 1870s), it housed an insurance brokerage, cigar store, and pool hall, which was the site of a headline-grabbing police raid in 1906 that landed 12 men in jail cells.

As late as 1900 (above right), similar-style wood market buildings still existed on Weehawken Street. Intrigued by their origins, newspapers wrongly claimed they were built in the 1790s.

According to 1905 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article (photo above left):

“Within a stone’s throw of the old prison site stands to-day the original row of frame houses, or shanties, that adorned the same block more than 100 years ago. It is the block bounded by Weehawken, West, Christopher, and Tenth Streets.”

As colorful as it sounds, the Eagle‘s historical information is incorrect.

In the 1920s, with Prohibition in effect, 6 Weehawken became “Billie’s Original Clam Broth House” (above right), which must have been a wonderfully dark and atmospheric place to get a bowl of hot soup on days when those cold Hudson River winds came in.

In the 1940s (at left), a new owner refurbished the building and sold “work clothes, canvas gloves, tobacco, and a strange assortment of odds and ends desired by seafarers and dockwallopers, who constitute his friends and customers,” wrote the Historic District Report.

For the next several decades, 6 Weehawken was occupied by a trucking company and a tire business.

By the 1970s, in a vastly less industrial West Village, gay bars moved in. Choo-Choo’s Pier opened in the 1970s, Sneakers existed through the 1990s.

The latest plan for 6 Weehawken brings it back to the Manhattan of the 17th century.

Last year, the son of artist Louise Bourgeois announced that the building he bought in 2006 for $4 million will be donated to the Lenape Nation and renovated into a prayer house. (An old for-sale listing for the house gives you an interior shot of a loft bedroom.)

Right now, the house appears to be empty, more shabby than chic—a silent sentry whose Hudson River side is marred by graffiti (above), waiting for its next generation of occupants.

The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910, has more on some of the city’s most iconic 19th century residences and commercial buildings.

[Third image: Harper’s Magazine, 1870s; fourth photo: MCNY, 1900, x2010.11.3687; fifth photo: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1906; fifth photo: MCNY, 1920, x2010.11.3690; sixth photo: NYPL]

Tags: 6 Weehawken Street, Gay Bars West Village, Greenwich Market West Village, Newgate Prison West Village, Oldest buildings in the West Village, Saloons of the West Village, Weehawken Street, West Village wood houses