Abingdon Court

1 Abingdon Square | also 75 Bank Street, 419 Bleecker Street | West Village | built 1938

Open on the map5 entries

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1892

    The eight-story Abingdon Square Hotel opens on the corner, with rooms from $2

    The Abingdon Square Hotel opened in 1892 and took up the whole Bleecker Street frontage between Abingdon Square and Bank Street. It rose eight stories and advertised rooms at "$2 and up," with its main entrance facing the park. In 1929 the real estate firm Bing & Bing bought it and nearby houses for an apartment project, but after demolition the plan stalled in the Depression and the corner sat vacant for almost a decade. This was an earlier building on the site.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1939

    September

    Irving Margon's Art Moderne Abingdon Court opens with 87 apartments

    A. A. Silberberg bought the vacant corner in December 1938, and hired architect Irving Margon, who filed plans for a $200,000, six-story apartment house. Completed in September 1939, it is built entirely of brick, with orange bands against a beige facade, streamlined fire escapes and an entrance in a garden court on Bank Street. Its 87 apartments had sunken living rooms and a roof garden, and Silberberg said it was fully occupied with a waiting list.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1941

    Teenage Betty Joan Perske, later Lauren Bacall, moves in with her mother

    In 1941 Natalie Bacal and her 17-year-old daughter, Betty Joan Perske, moved into Abingdon Court, and the girl was studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1942 the young woman was crowned Miss Greenwich Village, and her face reached the March 1943 cover of Harper's Bazaar. That caught the eye of Howard Hawks's wife, and in April 1943 she left for California for a screen test. Hawks renamed her Lauren, and she took Bacall as her surname.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1946

    March 24

    A gunman robs a returning Pacific veteran in the building's self-service elevator

    Early on March 24, 1946, resident C. R. Lehigh came home to Abingdon Court after four years of Pacific service in World War II and now worked as the automobile and yachting editor of the Newark News. As he stepped into the self-operated elevator, a man pointed a revolver at him and demanded his valuables. Lehigh handed over $41. After the robber fled, he called police.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1973

    Photographer Leo Stashin, who lived here, works on a book about a supposed Lincoln daguerreotype

    By 1970 the photographer Leo Stashin lived in the building with his wife, anatomist Dr. Judith Hardy Stashin. He collected nineteenth-century photographs, including portraits of presidents Tyler, Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce. In a Greenwich Village art shop he found an 1849 daguerreotype that he identified as Abraham Lincoln, though experts tended to disagree. He was writing a book on it when he died of cancer in 1973, aged 54.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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