A long time ago – in the late 80s – a friend asked me if I could track down information about the building where her (if I recall correctly) grandfather had lived. The address, 140 West Street, vaguely rang a bell, but in those pre-commercial-internet days, it took a day or two before I realized that was the New York Telephone Building:
That’s a very large, very-much-not residential modern building from 1926, but her grandfather had lived in New York long enough ago that he might have lived at the old 140 West Street that was torn down for NY Tel. The new building fills the block between West, Washington, Barclay, and Vesey Streets, so here’s that block in 1894, with a green arrow pointing to the old 140 West:
Blue indicates warehouses and similar uses, pink indicates residential buildings, and yellow indicates all-wood construction. (The pink and blue buildings have exterior brick walls.) So 140 West Street, prior to the late 1920s, was a three-story tenement of some kind. What did it look like? Look closely at the picture of the new 140 West Street. The low building in the foreground is the Washington Market, seen on the map, but further north, past NY Tel, there are some old warehouses and tenements:
The old 140 West looked something like that.
As with yesterday’s peculiarity, no one set out to be confusing in this conversation. But there are many buildings in New York, and many similar or even identical street names, and many lots that have been reused for multiple buildings. I’m pretty sure that the median lot in the country has had one building on it, rounded to the nearest whole number, so people may not realize that identifying a site in New York means using time as a dimension and trying hard not to stumble over duplicate names.
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