129 East 17th Street

Gramercy | built 1900

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. 1879

    Jane Scott completes an apartment house designed by Napoleon LeBrun

    Widow Jane Scott commissions architect Napoleon LeBrun to design a five-story apartment building at 129 East 17th Street, where each tenant gets a full floor with carved marble mantels and ornate plaster ceiling moldings. Apartment living is still a novel idea that upper middle-class New Yorkers have not readily accepted.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1881

    March 1

    Police Board president Stephen French convenes a meeting from his sickbed

    Stephen B. French, an early resident and president of the city's Police Board, is ill, so he summons the Police Board to his bedside in the building to conduct its meeting.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1911

    March 10

    Burglars raid an apartment using a ladder from the roof next door

    While engineer Oscar Stevens and his wife Caroline are away, thieves climb a ladder from the neighboring building's roof into their kitchen window and make off with more than $10,000 in jewelry. Their duplex apartment on the top floor included a separate laundry and maids' quarters, unusually spacious for the building.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1990

    Preservation architect Joseph Pell Lombardi renovates the 1879 building

    George and Patricia Back and Jane and Richard Perin, two couples, hire preservation architect Joseph Pell Lombardi to renovate the building while preserving details like its mahogany doors and marble-tiled foyer. Andrew Alpern argues in a 1975 survey that it is the oldest surviving "genteel" apartment house in the city.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 40 buildings with stories in Gramercy