156 Spring Street

also 399 West Broadway | SoHo | built 1880

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. 1819

    George Wragg completes 156 Spring Street as a Federal house with fluted Ionic columns at the door

    George Wragg inherited most of the south side of Spring Street between Wooster and Laurens (now West Broadway) and began building Federal houses on it in 1818. No. 156 was finished the next year: three stories of Flemish-bond red brick with a single dormer. Its decoration was saved for the entrance, which has fluted Ionic columns and an egg-and-dart transom.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1869

    April 14

    Shopkeeper Frederick Schuster and 2,000 other merchants petition Albany to investigate New York election fraud

    Frederick Schuster ran a business in the ground-floor store in 1869. On April 14 the New York Assembly heard a petition signed by Schuster and 2,000 other city businessmen after the Grant-Seymour presidential election. They charged that voting fraud, helped by prominent officials, had robbed the state of its rightful choice, and asked for a committee to investigate. The petition cited men voting more than once as an example.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1890

    April

    Alice Andre fatally strikes her son-in-law Charles George with a hatchet during a drunken fight over his starving child

    Charles George lived with his wife and three children in two upper rooms. In April 1890 a doctor told his wife their three-year-old was starving, and the couple fought over money for medicine. When George turned on his mother-in-law, Alice Andre, she struck him three times with a kindling hatchet. He died at St. Vincent's Hospital, but his dying statement that he deserved it was laid before the court, and she went free on a self-defense argument.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1983

    September

    Ben & Jerry's ice cream reaches Manhattan at Dimitri's Spring Street Cafe, with Ben Cohen and a cow

    In September 1983 Dimitri Chatzidakis opened Dimitri's Spring Street Cafe in the old ground-floor store, offering something no other Manhattan shop had: Ben & Jerry's ice cream. New York Magazine reported that Ben Cohen himself and the company's "famous Vermont cow" attended the opening. The upper floors had been converted to artists' studios in 1972.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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