The rural feel of an 1851 Harlem parish house

West 126th Street, in today’s Harlem, is an otherwise ordinary urban street of tenements and former factory buildings.

But cross Amsterdam Avenue, and you’ll find a simple wood parish house built in 1851 set back behind a lush front yard and shaded by tall trees.

Stop here for a moment, and you’ll be instantly transported back to mid-19th century Upper Manhattan.

The clapboard building is the former parsonage for St. Mary’s Protestant Episcopal Church.

Founded in 1823 when West 126th Street was called Lawrence Street, St. Mary’s served the small village of Manhattanville.

Manhattanville itself (below, a depiction of the road to Manhattanville in 1865) has a interesting history.

Laid out in 1806 with its own street grid 8 miles from the downtown city, this industrial town had about 15 houses the year the church was founded.

The congregation was an outgrowth of the more affluent St. Michael’s Church to the south in Bloomingdale, according to the 1998 Landmarks Preservation  Commission report. (St. Michael’s is still here, on West 99th Street.)

The first St. Mary’s church (at left) was a simple white structure consecrated in 1826.

“Manhattanville’s founding families, many of whom were related by marriage, were the core of St. Mary’s early congregation, which also included the widow and sons of Alexander Hamilton, and Daniel F. Tiemann, mayor of New York in 1858-1860,” states the report.

But most of Manhattanville’s early 19th century residents were poor; they were mainly British and Dutch descendants as well as some African Americans.

This might be why the church became the first in the city to abolish pew rental fees—a normal and accepted practice in New York’s churches at the time.

As Manhattanville grew, so did St. Mary’s. The clapboard parish house was completed in 1851.

In 1908, the original St. Mary’s was replaced by the current church. It was designed by Carrere and Hastings, the architects behind the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, among other buildings.

Through the 20th century, Manhattanville was subsumed by the larger city. Some vestiges of the old village remain, and the parsonage is the most enchanting example.

St. Mary’s continues to serve the community, an oasis with a rural feel harkening back to a more bucolic Upper Manhattan that’s been lost to urbanization.

[Third image: nycago.org; fourth image: NYPL; fifth image: MCNY 193233.173.477]

A mystery copper-topped building in East Harlem

Second Avenue in East Harlem is a wide stretch of road lined mostly with century-old tenements.

Makes sense—most of them date back to when the Second Avenue Elevated opened up northern Manhattan to developers, who built row after row of walkup buildings for New Yorkers desperate to escape the slums of the Lower East Side.

But there’s one building on the southeast corner at 109th Street that’s always come off as more elegant and distinguished along this longtime working class avenue.

With its wide arched windows on the third floor, decorative garlands and wreaths, and green copper facade at the top corner, this was a building meant to impress.

So what was it? A bank, apparently.

Though the department of buildings website doesn’t confirm exactly when the building went up, it certainly looks like a bank from the early 1900s, with refined aesthetics meant to inspire confidence and trust.

It’s also a little unclear what kind of bank this was. In 1918, a man named F.M. Ferrari and his partner, Giuseppe D’Onofrio, applied to operate a private bank here, with the address listed as 2112-2114 or 2118 Second Avenue.

The city refused their application. Yet by the 1920s, Ferrari was running a bank called the Harlem Bank of Commerce at this address.

This was the center of Italian Harlem, at the time Manhattan’s biggest Little Italy—with 89,000 residents by 1930.

That was three times the number of people in the Little Italy on Mulberry Street. With so many working people, Ferrari’s bank likely had plenty of customers.

In 1928, Ferrari changed the name to City Trust Company, advertising bank vaults and other banking services.

At some point, the bank disappeared, and the building was occupied by a mystery store (see the 1940s tax photo, above left), a small factory, and offices.

Today, East Harlem’s copper-topped building seems unoccupied—its large first-floor windows covered up, and its side entrance at 300 East 109th Street looking abandoned.

[Fourth image: NYC Tax Photos database; Fifth Image: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1928]