113 Chambers Street

also 95 Reade Street | Tribeca | built 1858

Open on the map5 entries

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

  1. 1832

    Banker Richard Ray marries Mary Boggs in the family house that stood on this site

    Before the present building, 113 Chambers Street was the fashionable home of merchant James Boggs and his wife, Sarah Lloyd Broome Boggs, who raised four surviving children there. Their daughter Mary Rebecca married banker Richard Ray in the house in 1832. Boggs died there in the 1830s and Sarah in 1849, after which Mary inherited the property, which ran through to a stable on Reade Street. This was an earlier building on the site.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1858

    Mary R. Ray replaces the Boggs house and stable with an Italianate store and loft building

    In 1857 Mary Ray had the house and its Reade Street stable demolished and began a store and loft building, completed in 1858, with matching Italianate facades on Chambers and Reade Streets. The stone-clad upper stories have mitered quoins and deep shelf-like lintels on brackets, and the tall cast-iron ground floors used columns from the catalog of Badger's Architectural Iron Works. Most early tenants were hardware and cutlery firms.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1876

    March 25

    Hardware merchant Edward Phelan leaves the building one evening and is found dead in the East River

    Edward Phelan, the only surviving partner of W. F. Shattuck & Co., left the firm's office around 6:00 p.m. on March 25, 1876 and stopped at Sweeney's Hotel at Chatham and Duane Streets to meet his bookkeeper before going home to Brooklyn. He never arrived. The next afternoon a body was spotted at the foot of Corlears Street, in the East River, and identified by a gold Masonic keystone bearing his name. The Times reported marks of violence on his face, and his friends rejected suicide; his pocketbook was also missing.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1895

    January

    Hardware dealer John H. Graham shows his "Midget" bicycle bell at the Madison Square Garden cycle show

    John H. Graham took over the hardware firm Graham & Haines by the late 1880s, renamed it John H. Graham & Co. and moved into the bicycle craze with accessories. In January 1895 he exhibited the "Midget" bell at the New-York Cycle Show, held in Madison Square Garden; which weighed three ounces and which he called the most satisfactory on the market. His company stayed until the early 1940s, selling everything from ice skates to cherry stoners.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1921

    November 22

    An aspiring actress sues a Riker-Spiegelmann vice president for $100,000 after learning he is married

    Thomas K. Gibbons, a 24-year-old vice president of Riker-Spiegelmann & Co., met aspiring actress Virginia Lee Dickens in July 1921 and, she said, proposed until she accepted. On November 22 the Times reported that she had learned he already had a wife, and she sued him for $100,000; he called the suit a joke. In April 1922, after a patrolman's jaw was broken during an attempted arrest, a judge sentenced Gibbons to three years in the penitentiary.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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