The Cecelia

116 Waverly Place | Greenwich Village | built 1891

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

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

1845
An earlier house on the site hosts Anne Lynch's literary salon
Before the Cecelia Flats is built, a house on this lot belongs to poet and teacher Anne Charlotte Lynch, who arrives in Greenwich Village in 1845 and opens her home to a weekly literary gathering. Edgar Allan Poe is a regular, reportedly reading "The Raven" aloud to the group, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Horace Greeley also attend before Lynch marries and moves the salon uptown.
Source: Ephemeral New York
1891
James Cunningham builds the Cecelia Flats at 116 Waverly Place
Developer James Cunningham, who buys the lot in 1887, hires architect Louis F. Heinecke to design a five-story apartment building here. Completed in 1891 at a cost of about $20,000, the Cecelia Flats has a rusticated brownstone base, polished marble columns, and terra cotta panels in a transitional Romanesque Revival style, replacing an earlier private house on the site.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
2014
The Cecelia is reborn as a $35 million single-family mansion
Architect Dirk Denison guts and rebuilds the five-story apartment building into a single 10,200-square-foot private home. The renovated townhouse hits the market in 2015 for $35 million, one of the priciest listings in Greenwich Village, and the asking price is cut to $26.5 million by early 2016 as it continues to seek a buyer.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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