A ship captain built this 1830 Allen Street house

In the early 19th century, the city of New York was booming and expanding.

Eyeing undeveloped land on the east side of the Bowery, city officials issued a proclamation in 1803 that ordered “all the streets on the ground commonly known by the name of ‘De Lancey’s ground’ be opened as soon as possible.”

‘De Lancey’s ground’ was a 300-acre estate on today’s Lower East Side (and the namesake of Delancey Street, of course.)

The land was once owned by James De Lancey, a prominent New Yorker of French Huguenot descent who sided with the British during the Revolutionary War and subsequently had his land seized by the city.

Within a few decades of the city order, roads, building lots, and then houses went up on the former De Lancey estate. By the 1820s, the area was filling up with tidy 2- and 3-story homes.

One of these homes was the Federal-style house at 143 Allen Street, built in 1830 and a rare survivor of this early 1800s building boom.

Number 143 and five others just like it were developed by George Sutton, a ship captain who sailed between New York and Charleston along what was called the “Cotton Triangle.”

Like so many other New Yorkers, Sutton made his money off Southern cotton.

His ships would bring cotton picked by slaves on plantations to Manhattan, where it would be transferred to ships heading to England, according to a Landmarks Preservation Commission report.

“The six houses at Allen and Rivington Streets were maintained as investment properties, although Sutton seems to have preferred renting the buildings to friends and business associates—many of whom also participated in the Cotton Triangle trade,” states the LPC report.

Perhaps realizing that middle and upper class New Yorkers were now moving into fashionable neighborhoods north of Houston Street, Sutton sold the Allen Street houses by 1838.

As early as the 1840s, Number 143 was chopped into a multi-family dwelling. Over the decades the occupants reflected waves of immigration, from a Prussian family of eight in the 19th century to 15 tenants, mostly salesmen, in the early 20th century.

Number 143’s stoop was removed at some point in the 1900s—but so were the elevated train tracks that since 1879 had cast Allen Street in darkness (in the above left photo, you can just see the house’s dormers peeking out above the tracks).

A group of artists bought 143 and its surviving sister house, 141, in 1980 (the above photo shows the two homes in 1985.) Number 141 was eventually sold and demolished.

But 143 Allen Street is still with us and mostly intact—built with money made off Southern cotton and today surrounded by luxury dwellings in the new-money Lower East Side.

[Second image: Wikipedia; Third image: NYPL; Fifth Image: Landmarks Preservation Committee Report]

A colonial-era plan to build “Delancey’s Square”

Browsing old maps can turn up some strange discoveries.

Take the map below, for example. Published by James Hinton, it shows the city streets and family estates circa 1776.

There’s a road leading to “Kepp’s Bay,” ship yards along today’s South Street, Crown Point, which is today’s Corlear’s Hook, and a square plot called Delaney’s New Square.

Delaney’s New Square—what was that?

In the growing city, it was supposed to be the (apparently misspelled) center of the new street grid developed on the Delancey estate, about 300 acres east of the Bowery on today’s Lower East Side.

The powerful Delancey family, descendents of French Huguenots, “began the layout of streets in the southwestern part of their property in the 1760s,” reports oldstreets.com.

“Their plan included a spacious square, called Delancey Square on the Ratzer map (right, at the bottom left), bounded by the present Eldridge, Essex, Hester and Broome Streets.”

Too bad the Revolutionary War got in the way. The Delanceys were loyalists, and after the war were exiled and had their property taken.

“In subdividing the land for sale, the State’s Commissioners of Forfeiture continued the grid established by the Delanceys but eliminated the grand square,” states oldstreets.com.

Interestingly, a century later, the location of this “spacious” square was one of the most crowded places on earth!

The solitary view “From Williamsburg Bridge”

“‘From Williamsburg Bridge’ is a city scene without noise or motion,” explains a page devoted to this 1928 Edward Hopper painting on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

It looks like the Delancey Street approach to the bridge, a row of tenement tops that may still be there today.

“The light on the buildings is bright and steady, and the only person visible is a woman sitting in profile in a top-floor window,” states the Met site.

“The broad format of this painting implies the continuation of the scene beyond the limits of the canvas: we can imagine the street, the girders of the nearby bridge, and perhaps other, identical brownstone buildings with solitary tenants lost in reverie.”

Three ways of looking at Delancey Street

This 1919 photo of Delancey Street at the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge shows a messy stretch of tenements, shops, trolleys, and walkers crossing the bridge on foot.

At the time, the bridge was a mere 16 years old.

In 1975, the trolleys and subway stations are gone, as are the crowds. The approach still looks like a mess.

Some of the tenements on the left at Clinton Street are still there, but many have been demolished and replaced by housing projects.

Here’s the same stretch in 2010. It’s still mostly a mess of cars, bargain stores, and a confusing juncture of streets.

But that block of tenements on the left at Clinton Street is still hanging in there.

The first two photos are from New York Then and Now.

29 years of art and activism on Rivington Street

ABC No Rio—art gallery, performance space, and “collection of collectives” since 1980—made its home on Rivington Street during the bad old days of the Lower East Side, before it was colonized by tea parlors, hipster hotels, and sneaker boutiques. 

The organization grew out of the 1980 Real Estate Show, during which 30 or so artists occupied an abandoned building on Delancey Street and staged an exhibit. The show lasted a day before the city shut it down. 

Faded signs on the Lower East Side

T & J Auto Repairs is on Delancey Street in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge.

 I love that they use the old OR phone exchange (for Orchard). OR remains in a handful of other old signs and faded ads up to East 14th Street.

The battered and weathered ad below is for two separate businesses. P. Zaccaro Real Estate was founded by Geraldine Ferraro’s father-in-law. J. Eis & Son sells (sold?) air conditioners.

And at the very bottom, there’s the Orchard exchange again.

The cherry grove of Delancey Street

The uptown side of the Delancey Street F train platform features lots of cherries—three cherry tree murals as well as several smaller cherry mosaics.

So what’s with the cherry motif? Before the Lower East Side became a jam-packed tenement district in the late 1800s, it was farmland owned by James DeLancey, acting colonial governor of New York in the 1750s who staunchly supported the British during the Revolutionary War.

The DeLancey farm supposedly had a cherry grove on what is now Orchard Street. After the war the farm was confiscated and divided up among smaller landowners. Somewhere along the way, the cherry grove met the ax as well.

How old is that Delancey Street liquor store?

Right before the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge is this gem of a shop. More than 80 years old—yep, that’s as old as hills indeed!