This sweet 1820s house is a reminder that the Bowery was once a middle-class residential street
Before the raucous dance halls and concert saloons, before the earsplitting roar of the elevated train, before the bars, breadlines, beer gardens, flop houses, wholesale districts, and early 2000s transition into a luxury hotel district, the Bowery was a residential road of tidy, single-family houses.
For a short time, anyway. But first, a little backstory.
What was known as “Bowry Road” by the Dutch—who established New Amsterdam in the early 1600s—served as a carriage and wagon drive so the burghers who ran the colony could get to and from their farms on the outskirts of town. In the 18th century, cattle drovers herded their livestock on this former Native American footpath, close to the slaughterhouse district at the Collect Pond.
After the turn of the 19th century, New York was in the throes of a population boom, with about 60,000 citizens. The Bowery, as it was officially renamed in 1813, was eyed for residential development.
First the cattle pens had to go. Several wealthy neighbors who hoped to rid the Bowery “of its noise and filth” bought out slaughterhouse owner Henry Astor (older brother of John Jacob) in the 1820s, per the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As the slaughterhouses began moving north to 23rd Street, vast family estates and small farms were sold off and carved up into new side streets. The gaslit, Roman temple-like Bowery Theater opened in 1826 and aimed to lure an elite clientele (fifth photo).
Thus began the Bowery’s stint as a fashionable address. Few of these early houses from the Bowery’s genteel era still stand. One that does is at 306 Bowery, across from First Street.
A mile or so north of where the Bowery begins at Chatham Square, this three-and-a-half story survivor is a relic of a street that by the 1830s “had become a bustling neighborhood composed in large part of brick and brick-fronted Federal-style row houses,” according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Number 306 was built not by a family but as in investment. George Lorillard had the house constructed in 1820 “at a time when this area was developing with homes for the city’s expanding middle class,” states the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 2003 report on the NoHo East Historic District.
Lorillard was the son of Pierre Lorillard, a French Huguenot who immigrated to New York around 1760 and started a snuff-grinding factory near Chatham Square.
By the 1820s, George Lorillard had taken over his father’s tobacco company and begun investing in real estate—building not just 306 Bowery but also 308 and 310 next door.
Number 306 had all the early 19th century touches that the family of a merchant or trader would desire: three stories, Flemish bond brickwork, sandstone lintels on and above the window sills, plus a half-floor with dormer windows and a peaked roof where a servant or two could board.
Who lived in this pretty little house? The earliest known tenant was a woman named Ann Fisher, who lived there in the 1820s, according to the LPC report. A notice announced that her funeral would be held in the house, or “her late residence,” as The Evening Post put it in 1838. She was 72 years old and the widow of Richard Fisher.
Lorillard sold the house in 1841. Maybe he sensed that the Bowery’s proximity to the Five Points slum district would eventually ruin the home’s value as an investment. Or he saw the Bowery’s low-rent future. Streetcars began running between Prince and 14th Street in 1832, states the Bowery Alliance, and the crowds at the Bowery Theater were increasingly coarse.
New residents moved in and out through the next several decades. A medical doctor, E.F. Maynard, lived there in the 1830s, per the 1837 Evening Post, and then bought it from Lorillard. Mahnor Day, a publisher and bookseller, was the next owner. After his death, his estate owned the house until 1899, according to the LPC report.
It was in the middle of the 19th century when the Bowery lost its appeal as a middle-class residential street. Commerce had moved in, then the rollicking vaudeville theaters, saloons, and late-night oyster houses. Working class and poor people, many who were German immigrants, rented rooms in the carved up old houses and new tenements.
Gang fights broke out. Criminals hung around, looking for easy marks. The Third Avenue Elevated began spewing steam overhead in 1878—two years after 306 Bowery underwent alterations to turn its ground floor into a storefront.
The era of the Bowery as an entertainment district was underway. 306 Bowery escaped major alteration (aside from a new fire escape, as seen in this 1940 photo) and remained a single-family home and ground-floor store until 1966, when it was portioned into artists’ studios.
Most recently the little house was home to a Patricia Field boutique, which closed in 2015. Its more heavily renovated sister houses at 308 and 310 Bowery are (or were) occupied by pricey drinking establishments.
The future feels uncertain for this 205-year-old remnant. But if you close your eyes and shut your ears, and you envision a front stoop instead of a storefront, you can almost imagine the house as it was in 1820 at the dawn of the Bowery’s brief turn as a respectable middle-class enclave.
[Third image: painting by William P. Chappel, Metmuseum.org; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]
