Misdirection By Mislabelling

From the New York Public Library’s collection of Wurts Brothers photos, “Stanton Street – Ridge Street (looking southwest)”:

Seems pretty straightforward: three tenement buildings. The first thing I do when seeing one of these photos is look to see what’s there today. The Lower East Side is a mix of blocks that have been untouched for 150 years and big swathes of 1950s and 60s urban renewal. In this case, it got confusing… Here’s the southwest corner of that intersection today:

That could be the two leftmost buildings in the Wurts trio with a new sixth story and a lot of stucco added…except that the left building in the Wurts photo has three windows across the front facade and the middle building has four, all roughly evenly spaced, and the current building has eight. I have a hard time seeing how that change could have been made, even if we assume the facade was entirely rebuilt. Looking at 1940, here’s the southwest corner:

Almost identical to 2025. Hey, what does the southeast corner look like in 1940?

And there are the Wurts buildings. But not anymore, as there’s now a park there:

Looking at a 1911 map, those were three very small tenements because they were on smaller than normal lots:

17 feet, 26, feet, and 24 feet wide, 60 feet deep. A standard Manhattan lot is 25 by 100. The corner building filled the lot since it had windows on the front and one side; the other two buildings were very shallow, barely bigger than rowhouses. Ordinarily, I assume that tenements without airshafts were pre-Old Law, but with such small buildings it was possible to get windows as required without the shafts. In this case, they are pre-Old Law. Here’s an 1868 map, eleven years before the dumbbell tenements were enacted in law:

Note that the southwest corner is three small houses, which were replaced before 1911 by that weird-looking building that’s still there.