12 White Street

Tribeca | built 1884

Open on the map5 entries

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

  1. 1844

    January 15

    George Tucker advertises his earlier house on this lot as a furnished boarding house

    An earlier building stood on this site: in 1833 George W. Tucker had torn down an older structure here and built a Federal-style home. A decade later he turned it into a boarding house, buying new furniture throughout. An advertisement in the New-York Daily Tribune on January 15, 1844 offered rooms for two couples and three single gentlemen, one block from Broadway, with references exchanged.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1884

    Lewis Broome's six-story neo-Grec loft, with a Hoboken-cast storefront, replaces an older dwelling

    Clarence, Charles and Arthur Tucker, trustees of George Tucker's estate, built this six-story loft in 1883-84 to plans by Lewis H. Broome. It replaced a masonry dwelling and is only 24 feet wide. Neo-Grec sandstone ornament with incised flowers is mixed with Queen Anne touches in color and texture. A foundry mark on the western storefront pilaster reads Mansfield and Fagan, Hoboken.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1889

    August 1

    Edwin Sonneborn is arrested over an obscene letter to a stenographer at his father's rubber comb firm

    The Sonneborn Rubber Comb and Novelty Company, which made rubber items for the electrical trade at a Pennsylvania plant, kept offices here. Hannah Crowley, a young typewriter and stenographer, worked for the firm. Edwin O. Sonneborn, who worked elsewhere but often stopped by his father's offices, was arrested on August 1, 1889 on a charge of sending her an obscene letter, with bail set at $3,000.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1892

    March 22

    A James Black and Company employee vanishes overboard from the Teutonic on a trip to Ireland

    James Black and Company, importers of linen handkerchiefs with a factory in Belfast, had offices in the building. Francis I. Flagg, a 44-year-old bachelor who crossed the Atlantic often for the firm, sailed on the steamship Teutonic on March 16, 1892 with his employer and Mrs. Black. On March 22 James Black cabled his brother Thomas that Flagg was lost overboard.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1912

    June 3

    A backdraft fire guts Israel Gitenstein's dry goods house and is later tied to an arson ring

    On June 3, 1912 bales of fabric smoldering in closed rooms exploded when windows were broken, bringing a three-alarm fire that gutted Israel Gitenstein's business and nearly collapsed the front wall. In 1913 confessions in an Illinois investigation of an arson trust named the Gitenstein fire, with $200,000 in losses and $300,000 in insurance, among the jobs of the torch Benjamin Fink.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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All 564 buildings with stories in Tribeca