Henry H. Cammann House
125 St Marks Place | St. George | built 1920
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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.
- 1892
Petroleum jelly maker Henry H. Cammann commissions a towered house from Edward A. Sargent
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S. Howard Martin bought the lot in 1887 and put up a small building, and artist-author Samuel G.W. Benjamin acquired it in December 1890. In 1892 Benjamin sold it to Mary Hooper Abbe Cammann, whose husband Henry H. Cammann made petroleum jelly; Sargent's dated drawings show Cammann commissioned the house that year. Its two-story tower has a conical roof pierced by eyebrow dormers. Banker Arthur Kavanaugh owned it by 1906.
“Henry Cammann commissioned Sargent to design a house for the site in 1892…”
- 1916
Silent film star Mabel Normand buys the house for her parents
In 1916 Mabel Normand, then 23 and a star of the Keystone Kop comedies, bought the house for her parents. Her father, Claude Normand, a stage carpenter and later stage manager, was already a longtime Staten Island resident; the couple shared it with their daughter Gladys and her husband, a Coast Guard skipper. Mabel lived in Los Angeles and visited only now and then.
- 1919
Claude Normand builds a two-story garage facing Carroll Place
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Acting as his own builder, Mabel Normand's father Claude put up a two-story neo-Colonial garage of frame and masonry at the northwest corner of the lot in 1919, with a stuccoed base and a shingled upper story. After the star died in 1930, ownership went first to her mother and later to her brother Claude Normand Jr., who kept it until the late 1930s, when it was divided into apartments.
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