Two Hundred and Fifty Plus, 1

Time for a new, short-lived series of posts! Time to steal an idea! I’m going to assuage my guilt over this blatant theft by giving credit in each post of the series: Beth Acly, principal of Cirrus Structural Engineering, has been reposting a series credited to her firm on LinkedIn called “Witnessing the Revolution,” in which they describe various buildings that were constructed before 1776. In other words, buildings that are older than the United States and, as they say, “Still standing. Still telling the story.” Given Cirrus’s location in central Connecticut, the buildings identified are all in southern New England. In order to show some respect for Cirrus’s work, I’m going to do the same but focus on buildings in and around New York City.

There’s actually a problem with looking for very old buildings in NYC: we have a tendency here to eat our own. The demolition of the past is most obvious in lower Manhattan: our office, at Broad and Stone Streets, is in the oldest part of the city, where the Dutch colony was planted 400 years ago. There’s basically nothing left of that era other than some archaeology and the (slightly modified) street layout. The oldest, most historic part of the city has seen so much redevelopment that many extant buildings in the area are the fourth (and in a few cases, I believe fifth) on their site.

The “oldest” building in Manhattan is Fraunces Tavern, from 1719, diagonally across the street from us, but it’s been so heavily rebuilt (twice, once in a stage-by-stage commercial expansion, and later in a somewhat feverish restoration in the early 1900s) that there’s not much left of the original fabric but walls and floors. The current mansard roof, for example, is pure 1900s; and the interior rooms are period restorations.

The list of old buildings in the city is skewed towards houses in the outer boroughs, where the development pressure was less, and a house might remain in private hands, often in a single family, for centuries. This leads to the somewhat amusing result that a lot of the oldest historic buildings in NYC were constructed as farmhouses or country estates.

Tomorrow: we worked on the third oldest building in Manhattan. We’re number three! We’re number three! We’re number three!