Why a modest 1827 home is missing from its row in Greenwich Village

For almost 200 years, the two little row houses clung together on Gay Street—one of those slender hideaway lanes in Greenwich Village that buck the city street grid.

(14 Gay Street, white building in center; 16 Gay Street is to its right, 2016)

Number 14 was built first, in 1827. Its original owner was a plow manufacturer named Curtis Hitchcock, according to the Greenwich Village Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report from 1969.

A year later, Number 16 went up next door, along with the rest of a row of three-story modest houses on the west side of the street. These tidy, low-stooped homes were occupied by the families of New York’s merchant class: small manufacturers like Hitchcock, as well as shop owners and artisans.

For the next two centuries, the two houses stood witness to Gay Street’s transformation from a one-block lane of middle-class houses to a shabbier African-American and immigrant enclave (third image, 1894) to a slice of the Bohemian Village, home to speakeasies, artists, and authors. (Above, photographed in 1937 by Berenice Abbott)

One of those authors was Ruth McKenney, whose writings about living with her sister, Eileen, in a basement apartment at Number 14 in the 1930s were the basis of the 1953 movie musical Wonderful Town.

But the story of Number 14 came to an end three months ago, when the city ordered its demolition after deeming the house “at risk of imminent collapse.” In January, its bricks and other early 19th century building materials were carted away in a dumpster.

How this landmarked piece of New York City history met the wrecking ball is under dispute. According to a December 2022 New York Times article, preservationists blame the owner of the property, a developer, for allowing the house to deteriorate; they also point the finger at the lack of coordination among city agencies that allowed the deterioration to happen.

The developer who owned the house—also the owner of Number 16—told the Times that it was never his intention to let the house fall apart.

Either way, the result is a glaring hole on one of the Village’s oldest and most charming streets—and the exposure of the wood-shingled exterior wall once apparently shared by Numbers 14 and 16, in view for the first time in almost 200 years.

On the other side of the hole in the streetscape is 12 Gay Street, looking like it was ripped at the seams.

[Top image: Alamy; second image: Berenice Abbott/Brooklyn Museum; third image: NYPL Digital Collection]