Ghost Hunting

From last fall, the corner of Christopher and Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village:

The building we’re looking at, fronting on Bleecker, looks to be a slightly nicer than average Old Law tenement: it’s not a full dumbbell shape, but rather a T in plan, with the crossbar facing the street and the stem running back in the lot. Since only the crossbar directly abuts the lot line of the empty lot at the corner* we only have a ghost on that side wall. It shows the scars of joist removal and stuccoing over the joist pockets at the second and third floors and roof; the fence blocks us from seeing if there’s a similar scar from an elevated first floor. My first guess is that there was a rowhouse on the corner, and similar houses were demolished to build the tenement. Time to go to the maps…

In 1895,

we have a four-story building on that wedge-shaped on that site, the lower left corner, technically the southeast. The tenement wasn’t there yet, and we have some two-story buildings on that site, but we have three tenements further down Bleecker on the block. If we come forward in time to 1916, there’s the tenement next door:

Going backwards, there’s not much. The 1857 map doesn’t even bother showing the city that far north; the other shows buildings on both lots but no detail. Here’s 1867:

So it seems my guess was wrong. The tenement was constructed after the now-demolished building on the corner, but the demolished building seems to have been built independently of the buildings that used to be on the tenement site. The designation report for the Greenwich Village Historic District says the tenement was constructed in 1902, which would make it a New Law tenement, but I’d swear its side yards are too narrow for that. The report also says that the corner building was from 1833 and was part of a row that included the two two-story buildings on the tenement site. As usual, the Village has defeated me. If I had a reason to really dig into this corner, I’d probably figure it out.

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* There is no north/south/east/west. The Village has a non-Euclidian street grid where, among other things, 4th Street crosses 12th Street. In this case, Bleecker and Christopher are both nominally east-west streets, and here they are crossing at right angles.