From a merchant’s mansion to a home for friendless women, the many lives of an 1847 brownstone on 14th Street

A rollicking mix of apartment buildings, loft spaces, bars, and discount stores, West 14th Street hasn’t been considered an elite place to build a home for almost two centuries.

But in the New York of the 1840s, what had once been the dividing line between the urban city and the wilds of Manhattan was transforming into a fashionable residential thoroughfare.

Families with money and means began purchasing land on West 14th Street and putting up wide, roomy brownstones from Union Square to Eighth Avenue. One of those new brownstone dwellers was Andrew S. Norwood.

Norwood’s name wouldn’t resonate with contemporary city residents. But in his day, this Knickerbocker New Yorker was considered one of Gotham’s “solid and substantial” citizens, per Valentine’s Manual of Old New York.

Born in 1770 and the son of a Patriot, Norwood became a successful merchant, stockbroker, the owner of a line of packet ships, a founder of the Presbyterian church on Cedar Street, a friend of the Marquis of Lafayette and “the Washington family,” and a resident of a posh home on Bond Street, per Valentine’s Manual.

In 1845, he added real estate developer to the mix and bought several lots on 14th and 15th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, states the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). By 1847, he had built the first three brick or masonry buildings on the north side of the block: numbers 239, 241, and 243 West 14th Street.

All three met the definition of “first class” single-family houses, per the LPC. Norwood chose 241 as his family home, an outstanding example of “a transitional style which combines Greek Revival with Italianate features,” wrote the LPC, noting the full-length French doors on the first floor windows, the cast-iron balconies, and the brownstone trim on the red brick facade.

We can assume Norwood and his family lived well inside their new house, with its 14-foot ceilings, 13 fireplaces, mahogany parlor doors, silver doorknobs, and mantelpiece made of Carrara marble. The generously sized house had room for dinner parties and servants’ quarters, and one can imagine the family hosting prominent West 14th Street neighbors, like the Van Beurens.

At age 86, Norwood passed away in his house in 1856—just as commercial establishments were coming to 14th Street and the residential vibe was giving way to stores and theaters.

The house stayed in the Norwood family until the turn of the century. Norwood’s son, also named Andrew and also a stockbroker (and original member of the New York Stock Exchange), became the owner, per the LPC.

Whether he lived there until his death in 1879 isn’t clear; an 1871 ad in the New York Daily Herald notes an upcoming auction of “elegant household furniture” at 241 West 14th Street.

In any case, the house’s days as a 19th century private residence were over. By the 1880s it served as a boarding house, according to a New York Times mention.

In 1890, the house changed hands again. Now it functioned as the headquarters of the New York Deaconess’ Home and Training School of the Methodist Episcopal Church, an organization that “trained nurse deaconesses who care for the sick poor in their homes,” according to an 1895 New York City charities directory.

King’s Handbook of 1892 added that the charity had “about a score of inmates” who study the bible, medicine, hygiene, and nursing to prepare for being in service to “the poor and the sick…the sick and the dying.”

Five years later, a different type of “inmate” lived in Andrew Norwood’s house, which had now become the “Shelter for Respectable Girls.” Run by a Christian denomination, the shelter put out an urgent plea in the New York Times in 1899 for donations to continue its work “giving shelter and help to respectable girls who are homeless and friendless.”

In 1900, more than 500 girls stayed at the shelter, which catered to young “friendless” women who came to New York for job opportunities yet had no connections, nor a “respectable” place to stay.

In the early 1900s, after the Norwood estate sold the house, a dentist became the occupant. At some point in the 20th century it transformed into a funeral home. Perhaps this is what the vertical sign hanging off the facade states in the fourth photo, above, from 1940.

Andrew Norwood’s home became a private residence once again in 1976, when a real estate broker named Raf Borello bought the property, according to venuereport.com. Borello began a 30-year restoration of this 1840s anachronism.

The restoration involved “uncovering layers of paint, plaster, dirt, and muck to bring the house back to its glory days,” stated venuereport.com. “By the time Borello died in 2005, the property was fully restored, featured a phenomenal garden in the back, and the exterior had been registered to the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission.”

What would come next for this revitalized remnant of pre-Civil War New York City?

It was purchased in 2007 and transformed into the Norwood Club, a members-only club described in venuereport.com by the owner, Alan Linn, as “a modern-day salon for the creative community in New York, a space to congregate, socialize and swap ideas.  It is a ‘home for the curious.'”

The Club seemed to thrive for at least a decade, with more than a thousand members who submitted to an interview before being selected to join. Perhaps the pandemic took its toll, as the Norwood Club closed in 2022.

Since then, Andrew Norwood’s elegant brownstone, so lovely and stylish in its era, has been looking rough around the edges. Debris is scattered on the stoop, and the columns flanking the front doors are flaking and cracking.

Let’s hope a savior appears for this dowager of a brownstone on an unbeautiful block but with such a deep and rich backstory.

[Fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth image: New York Times]

A huge new home for 19th century orphans in the countryside of today’s Riverside Drive

It was 23 years after the end of the Revolutionary War. Before the launch of the Children’s Aid Society, before New York’s Gilded Age benevolent groups focused on the plight of vulnerable kids, before city welfare organizations, there was the New York Orphan Asylum Society.

Founded in 1806 by elite female citizens like Elizabeth Hamilton (below image), the recent widow of Alexander, and Isabella Graham (also a widow and founder of a number of charitable organizations), the Society sought to protect orphans from ending up in the public almshouse.

At the time, an orphan was a child who lost both parents—or who had one living parent unable to care for them. (Often, these kids were called “half-orphans.”) Adding to the city’s orphan population were immigrant children whose parents died on their journey to America.

Exactly how many orphans existed in New York at the dawn of the 19th century isn’t clear; the city population hovered under 100,000. But after the Civil War, with population at roughly one million, their numbers were estimated to be in the tens of thousands.

Whatever the number was, Hamilton, Graham (below image), and the rest of the women in the Society were deeply moved by their plight. That year, the organization rented a small house on West Fourth Street (after which became known as Asylum Street) in Greenwich Village. There, 16 orphans lived with and were looked after by an older couple, according to Village Preservation.

By 1807, the Society needed more space. “The second home of the Asylum was a 50 feet square brick building capable of housing 200 orphans” on land just north of the first building, states Village Preservation. Unlike the first orphan home, which was funded with private donations, the second one relied on a combination of private money, city and state funds, and bank loans.

“Although Greenwich Village was a good choice for the [Asylum’s] launch, environmental and health pressures soon forced yet another move,” stated Village Preservation. By 1839, the society relocated to a large facility in the Bloomingdale section of Manhattan at today’s 73rd Street, per Pam Tice in a piece in Bloomingdalehistory.com.

Why so far out of the city, which was about five miles south? Bloomingdale was a relatively remote area of small farms and a smattering of wealthy estate houses. Land was more abundant and less expensive than it was downtown.

The New York Orphan Asylum wasn’t the only facility that decided to make Bloomingdale home. Other orphanages included the Leake and Watts Orphan House (now the site of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine) and the Children’s Fold (100th Street and the Boulevard, aka Broadway), per Tice. These institutional settings were preceded by the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, where Columbia University stands today.

Spanning 73rd to 74th Streets, the new Asylum continued to serve the city’s orphans. A school was established, as was an infant nursery. According to the Society’s annual report from 1876, a total of 188 boys and girls were residents, down from 217 the year before. A $37K budget paid for clothing, bedding, fuel, laundry, furniture, books, medical needs, as well as the salaries of employees, including teachers and “matrons” who kept an eye on the children.

“From most of those who have left us to occupy various situations in life, letters are constantly received by those ladies who became their correspondents, telling of happy homes, good kind friends, and some speaking of growth in Christian grace and knowledge,” noted the Society’s secretary, M.L.R. Satterlee.

By the end of the 19th century, the Asylum’s future in Bloomingdale wasn’t looking bright. What was now known as the “West End” of Manhattan was undergoing rapid development into a high-class residential area of Beaux-Arts row houses and stand-alone mansions.

In 1900, the Asylum moved once again, this time to Westchester. In the coming decades, the New York Orphan Asylum Society became Graham Windham, a New York–based organization that helps children and families in crisis and still exists today.

And what about the facility and the land it sat on, which now had a Riverside Drive address? The Society sold them to Charles M. Schwab, a steel magnate. Schwab promptly tore down the orphanage and built himself an 86-room French chateau-style mansion.

Completed in 1906, Schwab’s mansion was one of the largest private homes ever built in New York City—a totem of Gilded Age excess lasting until the 1940s.

Find out more about the Schwab Mansion and the other palatial homes and townhouses of Gilded Age Riverside Drive by joining Ephemeral New York on a walking tour December 16! Click this link for more info.

[Top image: New-York Historical Society; second image: Wikipedia; third image: NYPL Digital Collection; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collection; sixth image: MCNY 93.1.1.241; seventh image: MCNY 93.1.1.244; eighth image: NYPL Digital Collection]

A captivating photo of a marketplace, a fire tower, and the Greenwich Village of the 1860s

It’s easy to become absorbed in a panorama view of New York City—to find yourself enthralled by the details of streets and buildings and enchanted by the mysterious towers and steeples of the expansive cityscape in the distance.

And when that panorama dates back to the 1860s—a time when landscape photography was certainly in use but not quite as widespread as it would be a decade later—you might as well cancel all your plans for the day; you’ll be entranced for hours.

That’s my experience looking at this 1864 image of Jefferson Market, at Sixth and Greenwich Avenues and 10th Street in Greenwich Village. While the Victorian Gothic Jefferson Market Courthouse that replaced it in 1877 (and still stands today) is a magnificent sight to behold, this low-rise warren of market stalls and the fire watchtower beside it offer insight into the Civil War-era Village.

The first Jefferson Market, at the northwest corner of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, got its start in 1833; it was a one- and two-story collection of stalls with a wooden cupola on top that served as a fire watchtower (above).

That original watchtower actually burned down in 1851. The eight-story watchtower in the photo at the top of this post and in the below illustration is its replacement—one of the tallest structures in the city at the time.

At the market, butchers, fishmongers, poultry vendors, and hucksters sold their wares, according to NYC Parks. A “country market” of vegetable sellers joined the complex, all serving the food and grocery needs of an increasingly industrialized Greenwich Village.

The fire watchtower—one of eight in the city in the mid-19th century—was manned by a watcher who sounded a bell that summoned volunteer firefighters to the site of smoke or flames. No longer needed after 1878 thanks to the invention of the telegraph and the creation of a professional fire department, the watchtower at Jefferson Market became obsolete.

What’s beyond the market and fire watchtower captivates me. I believe we’re looking north in the panorama photo at top; there’s a stretch of two-story buildings with an ad for “C.H. Howe, Painter” on the side. On the next block, a row of three-story buildings can be seen. I think this row still exists—one building might be Barney’s Hardware, at 467 Sixth Avenue.

The area near the market has a gritty feel, with wagons backed into the market sheds and barrels piled on the sidewalk. A streetcar running on hard-to-see steel rails is the only vehicle on a rough-looking Sixth Avenue; perhaps the photo was taken early in the morning, before the workday commenced.

While the fire tower dominates the photo, church steeples loom in the distance. The spire to the right of the tower might belong to the Church of the Annunciation (above), a Gothic-style church on 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues from 1846 until it was demolished in 1895, according to David W. Dunlap’s From Abyssinian to Zion : a Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship.

Spires and towers, wooden and cloth canopies covering storefronts, wagons and a streetcar, and a somewhat shabby marketplace crowned by a strangely lovely watchtower—it’s not the charming Greenwich Village of winding cowpaths and precious shops but a bustling part of the urbanized city.

In the 1860s, the neighborhood had already been left behind by the fashionable set in favor of newer enclaves beyond 14th Street.

[Top photo: New York Then and Now; second image: dlibopenlib.org; third image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

How long this peaked-roof ghost building has haunted Jane Street

Ghost buildings abound all over New York City. This site has delved into the backstory of many of these phantom dwellings—homes, stables, and warehouses that left their imprint on the cityscape long after they were reduced to a pile of bricks.

Yet this ghost building of Jane Street remains a mystery. Just a few stories high and with a simple peaked roof, its outline follows the contours of one of the modest Federal-style homes that were popular in the early 19th century and can still be found in downtown neighborhoods.

Hoping to find a photo of the original house, I’ve been searching archives. But what I found in the New York Public Library Digital Collection surprised me.

This is a 1933 photo of this stretch of Jane Street—and there’s the faded outline of the same mystery house behind a one-story building that may have started out in the 19th century as a carriage house.

It’s been a ghost for at least 90 years, its peaked roof and humble dimensions strangely preserved on a tenement-style building that was once the newcomer on the block.

[Photo: NYPL Digital Collection]

The West Village sconce lights inspired by tendrils and tentacles

The lights that illuminate New York at night tend to go unnoticed. But sometimes you come across some strangely unique examples that make you do a double-take.

That’s what happened as I passed 33 Bank Street one weekend. Like so many other low-rise apartment houses, this six-story residence has two sconce lights flanking the front entrance.

Nothing unusual about that at first glance. Except these twin light fixtures, with their grooves and curlicues, seemed to be inspired by the natural world. They’re shaped like seahorses, or jellyfish tentacles, or plant tendrils, perhaps even an elephant trunk.

Inspiration from flora or fauna along the cityscape would hardly be unusual, especially in 1913. That’s the year 33 Bank Street was constructed—coinciding with the tail end of the Art Nouveau movement that featured architecture and decorative objects graced with the sinuous lines and organic curves of nature.

Of course, the sconces might look the way they do by accident or due to decades of buildup from rust and paint. I like to think the designer who chose them got a kick out of putting up light fixtures modeled after plants and animals in the middle of the urban jungle that is New York City.

How a 200-year-old Yorkville farmhouse ended up as a private home in today’s West Village

The West Village is rich with historic houses—especially diminutive Federal-style survivors from the early 19th century and elegant brownstone rows constructed before and after the Civil War.

But this modest white clapboard farmhouse on Charles and Greenwich Streets might be the most intriguing of all. Every day, it attracts curious views from passersby—who peer through its iron fence and peek over the thick ivy walls to catch a glimpse of the antebellum city on a quiet West Village corner.

Dwarfed by its tall tenement neighbor, the tidy farmhouse (with a suburban-style driveway) resembles something out of a storybook: three small sections that kind of unfold like a book, two short stories, one slender brick chimney, and a roof that looks, well, a bit askew.

This New York relic has been at 121 Charles Street for more than 50 years, and its dollhouse-like presence delights and puzzles newer generations of West Villagers.

But like so many Village mysteries, the farmhouse has a fascinating backstory. This one began miles away in the Manhattan countryside and involves urban redevelopment, renters unwilling to part with of a beloved home, and a flatbed truck.

The farmhouse’s journey started in Yorkville roughly 200 years ago. At the time, Yorkville was a bucolic part of Manhattan dotted with farms and estate houses by the East River—connected to the main city only by the Boston Post Road (about today’s Third Avenue) and stage lines.

In this remote enclave, someone built the little farmhouse, putting in small paned windows and a staircase outside that connected the two floors, per a description from a 1966 New York Times article. Its location corresponded to today’s York Avenue between 71st and 72nd Streets.

Exactly when it went up isn’t known. “Saw marks found on the wood indicate that it was built after the introduction of saw mills, which would date the house to the early 19th century at the earliest,” states a post on Off the Grid, part of the website of historic preservation group Village Preservation.

In the 1860s, as Yorkville began losing its rural feel, the farmhouse was purchased by a man named William Glass, who with his wife ran a dairy inside.

The couple also built a two-story house in front of the farmhouse, 1335 York Avenue, thereby blocking it from view from the street. “The property became known as Cobble Court because of the cobblestones that paved the area between the two houses,” notes Village Preservation.

After spending time as a restaurant in the early 20th century, the farmhouse became a residential rental. In the 1940s, children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown (above, in a Life magazine photo) became the latest occupant. Perhaps living in a farmhouse walled behind another house helped inspire her most famous book, 1947’s Goodnight Moon.

In the 1960s, a man named Sven Bernhard (below), and later his wife, Ingrid, made their home in the farmhouse. “Time and various tenancies had dealt harshly with the two-story clapboard dwelling, and when Mr. Bernhard moved into it in 1960 it was virtually uninhabitable,” wrote Thomas W. Ennis in the 1966 New York Times article on this newly rediscovered “hidden house.”

“From 1960 to 1963, Mr. Bernhard, working alone, rehabilitated the dwelling, for which he is paying $65 in rent,” continued the 1966 Times article. The outside staircase was enclosed, per the article, and Bernhard added a glass porch.

This is where urban redevelopment makes its appearance. The Archdiocese of New York City now owned the farmhouse; it had been sold to them by descendants of the Glass family. The Archdiocese planned to raze a row of houses on York Avenue, including Number 1335 and the farmhouse behind it, to build the Mary Manning Walsh Home for the Aged.

“Still renters but unwilling to give up their beloved house, the Bernhards went to court and eventually won ownership around July 1966,” states Village Preservation. They had six months, until January 31, 1967, to move it elsewhere.” The lot at Charles and Greenwich Streets was found and secured.

After much bureaucratic wrangling with permits and permissions, the move took place in March 1967 (above). “The cobbles from the York Avenue site were brought here to recreate Cobble Court,” adds Village Preservation.

The Bernards stayed in their farmhouse until 1986. In 2001, another owner—who told The New York Times in a 2008 article that she’d “pined for the house” since she was a child in the late 1960s, when she “spotted it from the back of her parents’ station wagon”—took on a renovation. About 500 square feet was added, cedar planking restored, and new electric and plumbing put in.

In 2014, the farmhouse had a brush with potential demolition when the house was briefly put up for sale for $20 million. These days, this securely landmarked anachronism of rural New York City seems to have found its forever home.

[Fourth photo: Life magazine via Literary Hub; fifth photo: New York Times; sixth photo: Jack Manning/New York Times via Village Preservation]

One pioneering Ashcan painter, four views of Washington Square Park

What exactly attracted William Glackens to Washington Square, leading this founding member of the Ashcan School to create more than 20 paintings set in this iconic Greenwich Village park between 1908 and 1914, according to Washington Square Park Blog?

[“Washington Square Park,” 1908]

Proximity likely had something to do with it. After Glackens left his home city of Philadelphia and relocated to New York City in 1896, he found a studio on the southern edge of Washington Square, according to the New-York Historical Society. Over the years, he occupied studios at different locations on the Square.

Glackens also moved with his family into a circa-1841 townhouse at 10 West Ninth Street, steps away from Washington Arch. Here, the painter dubbed the “American Renoir” lived and worked from 1910 to his death in 1938, explains Village Preservation in a 2019 Off the Grid blog post.

[“Descending From a Bus,” 1910]

But there might be something more to it than the Square’s convenient location. At the time Glackens established himself in Greenwich Village, Washington Square “represented the demarcation between the old and new communities of New York,” according to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA).

While the descendants of many old New York families still lived in the stately brownstones of Washington Square North, “the less fashionable neighborhoods around Washington Square attracted newly arrived immigrants who worked in the factories and sweatshops nearby and also artists (including Glackens) who were drawn to the bohemian lifestyle of the district,” the MFA states.

[“Italo-American Celebration,” 1912]

The presence of this new population mix in Washington Square is evident in Glackens’ 1912 painting of an Italian immigrant parade celebrating Christopher Columbus. Per the MFA: “The juxtaposition of the Old World and the New is further enhanced by the prominence of the Italian and American flags standing side by side in the lower foreground.”

What else may have influenced his decision to paint Washington Square Park, particularly his many full-color depictions of moments of leisure and pleasure?

[“29 Washington Square,” 1911]

Perhaps he was inspired by the simple loveliness of this historic square, as so many ordinary New Yorkers are as well.

Two glimpses of life in Prohibition-era New York, one in sunlight and the other in shadows

Born in Austria, Samuel Brecher immigrated to New York City with his family in 1910. He studied at Cooper Union and then the National Academy of Design before establishing himself as a painter of rural coastal scenes and small towns—and later, of clowns.

But New York City is where Brecher spent the majority of his life (he died in 1980), working out of a studio on 23rd Street in Chelsea, according to 200 Main Art & Wine Gallery.

Based on two paintings that feature disconnected figures at different times of day and points on the streetscape, Brecher has something to say about the smallness and internal isolation of city life.

“The Speak Easy,” (above) from 1926-1930, depicts a tenement lane or alley in gritty earth tones. People appear small on opposite sides of the sidewalk, almost like they’re on a stage.

A backlit woman in a pink skirt has her hands at her hips. Is she the disgruntled wife of one of the men under the streetlamp, ordering him to home after a drunken night at an unseen speakeasy? Perhaps the speakeasy is the building behind her, and she, the proprietor, has kicked the men out.

Then again, she may not even be addressing the men at all; her expression seems angled away from them, possibly directed at another figure out of view. It’s hard to tell, but these people may be under elevated train tracks, their dramas made even smaller by the overarching bigness of the modern city.

The second painting, “West Eighth Street,” gives us low-rise West Eighth and Sixth Avenue in bright color. Again, Brecher depicts several disconnected figures, also from a vantage point that emphasizes their insignificance. (And could the rough brushstrokes underscore their rough, turbulent lives?)

Similar to the people in “The Speak Easy,” these New Yorkers seem isolated from one another, despite their physical closeness. Like all of us moving around the city, they’re likely caught up in the challenges of their relatively small yet meaningful lives—internal lives that strangers have no access to.

They’re together on the street, yet miles away from one another.

[The Speak Easy: 200 Main Art & Wine Gallery; West Eighth Street: New-York Historical Society]

A snowy Village park by a midcentury painter of New York’s streets and squares

I don’t usually post winter scenes during summer months. But there’s heat in this 1930s painting of a snow-covered Jackson Square Park—a block-long triangle of green space in Greenwich Village at the awkward juncture of Greenwich and Eighth Avenues and Horatio Street.

Alfred Mira is the painter, and the heat comes from him, I think. Growing up in Greenwich Village in an Italian immigrant family, Mira studied at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design. But according to a biography from Christie’s, Mira found his artistic footing during a trip to Europe when he was a young man.

“Mira was particularly fascinated with the city streets and their frenetic energy,” the site states. “After traveling throughout Europe in 1928, Mira realized that the bustling avenues of New York afforded him the profound inspiration he was attempting to find in Europe. Returning to New York, Mira devoted himself to painting its streets, avenues and squares.”

If this really is Jackson Square in the 1930s, things seem a little askew. A 1920s apartment house should be on the right side of the painting between Greenwich and Horatio; Jackson Square itself seems way out of proportion. And shouldn’t there be cars on these roads?

But no matter. It’s a romantic depiction of a piece of Greenwich Village with passion and energy, from the rich colors of the tenements to the faceless people in motion to the neon store signs glowing like embers.

For more Alfred Mira paintings, click this link.

The mystery back houses behind East 26th Street

East 26th Street between Second and Third Avenues is within the borders of Kips Bay or part of the Gramercy neighborhood, depending on the source you consult.

Either way, it’s an old street—likely developed in the first half of the 19th century as an enclave of row houses and then tenements for middle class and working-class New Yorkers.

Recently I was walking down this quiet Manhattan block when I spotted something unusual: it appeared to be a back house. This three-story white walkup wasn’t hidden from view as back houses normally are but was clearly visible from the side behind a taller main house that faced the street.

If you walk New York’s older neighborhoods—Greenwich Village, the East Village, Chelsea, Brooklyn Heights—then you’ve probably peeked between fence posts and spotted a back house or two. In the 19th century, owners often built them behind their main house to function as a carriage house for horses.

More unscrupulous landlords, however, ignored building codes and put them up to cram in extra tenants and squeeze more rent out of their property.

Typically only accessed through the front building, back houses have a romantic aura around them. Each is a secret piece of old New York that made it into the modern era.

This one, on the north side of the street, didn’t necessarily seem romantic. It wasn’t in great shape, and it’s unclear if anyone was living there.

The case was different with two other back houses blocked mostly from view on the south side of the street. The front buildings, at 206-210 East 26th Street, are separated by a locked gate (above photo).

Inside the gate is a courtyard that leads to two distinct buildings largely hidden behind the front houses, each four stories high and with mid-19th century features.

These appear to be old-school back houses recycled into charming contemporary apartments. It’s hard to know for sure; I didn’t uncover any clues about their construction. But the block was developed in an era when landlords were happy to skirt the law in order to maximize their building lots and profits.

Other back houses include this former carriage house behind a tenement on Avenue B in the East Village, and a West Village back house from the 18th century that returned to view during construction but is once again buried behind brick and mortar.