Swift, Seaman & Company Building

122 Chambers Street | also 52 Warren Street | Tribeca | built 1858

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1857

    Emily Jones replaces the family house with a sandstone store-and-loft building

    After inheriting the Chambers Street property in 1856, Emily Jones razed the house Isaac Jones Jr. had built there in 1818 for his bride, along with the former Hoghland house behind it on Warren Street. In its place she erected a five-story store-and-loft building with matching sandstone fronts on both streets, completed about a year later. The name of her architect has been lost.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1858

    Swift & Seaman take much of the building for harness brasses and saddlery hardware

    City directories for 1858 list the hardware dealers Swift & Seaman at both 122 Chambers and 52 Warren Street. The firm, which later became Swift, Seaman & Co., sold harness brasses and saddlery hardware and remained until 1879. A related saddlery-hardware house, Seaman Brother & Sniffin, was in the building by 1865, and the harness trade stayed a thread here well into the twentieth century.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1928

    February 28

    Alpheus Lawrence dies after reporting to the same address every day for 65 years

    Alpheus Lawrence was hired at 16 in 1863 as a mailroom boy by the harness maker Abraham R. Van Nest Company at 122 Chambers Street. When Bartley Brothers & Hall succeeded the firm in 1918 he stayed on in the shipping department. He died at his Brooklyn home at 81, and the New York Times observed that he had gone to work at this one address every day from his first job until the end.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1930

    September 17

    Sporting-goods dealer at 52 Warren Street is arrested for selling guns to Al Capone's agents

    Cornelius Bertschinger ran Hudson Sporting Goods, a shop on the building's Warren Street side, on the third floor. The New York Times reported his arrest in September 1930 for selling firearms to two men described as agents of Al Capone, who were shipping the weapons to Chicago. The shop stayed open for decades. A gun traced to it was used in a 1968 Central Park shooting, and the store was itself burgled by teenage gang members in 1960.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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