165 Mercer Street
SoHo | built 1871
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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.
- 1846
A riding school on the lot gives ladies and gentlemen separate hours in the saddle
Before the cast-iron store went up, John S. Roulstone ran a riding school on this Mercer Street site in the 1840s. His advertisement of February 7, 1846 set aside the morning and early afternoon for women and two evening hours for men, and promised that no gentlemen would be admitted during the ladies' hours. Men who boarded their own horses there could ride them in the school at no charge.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1871
Henry Fernbach's five-story cast-iron store for developer James Kent is completed
Work began on August 29, 1870, and the building was finished on May 24, 1871. Henry Fernbach designed it and John Conover built it for the developer James Kent. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's SoHo-Cast Iron district survey lists an iron facade five stories tall and six bays wide, originally meant for retail use.
- 1882
Joseph Ullman's firm pays out $216,250 in one year for buffalo robes and hides
The naturalist William Hornaday, in his study of the destruction of the American bison, cited Joseph Ullman's firm at 165 Mercer Street, which paid $216,250 for robes and hides in 1882 alone. He set that beside the nearly one million dollars that J. & A. Boskowitz of Greene Street spent over eight years. Together the figures showed how much money the hide trade moved, which he put at perhaps twenty million dollars in all.
Source: gutenberg.org
- 1905
Midday fur burglars hit Joseph Ullman & Co. and neighbors until an overstuffed satchel betrays them
Thieves worked the fur district at lunchtime in 1905: one man chatted with the clerk while his partner stuffed a big satchel with skins. Nearly two dozen firms were hit, Joseph Ullman & Co. among them. The pair took about $12,000 in furs over six months, then tried Edgar Lehman's wholesale house, where one packed in so many pelts that the bag would not shut. Employees chased them, and one man was caught.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1907
A fire breaks out in the Triangle Waist Company's Diamond Waist loft, years before its deadly blaze
On April 12, 1907, a fire started in the loft of the Diamond Waist Company, a maker of the blouses called waists. The firm was owned and run by the Triangle Waist Company, headquartered in the Asch Building near Washington Square. The blaze was put out quickly, but it now reads as a grim foreshadowing of the later Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1939
Federal agents raid the Mercer-Houston Garage and arrest ten men in a giant alcohol ring
Federal agents watched the garage from across the street before raiding it on October 16, 1939, and arrested the gangster Joseph "Black Lefty" Lapadura and nine other men. U.S. Attorney John T. Cahill described the syndicate as the biggest bootleg operation since the Prohibition years. Its half-dozen stills in New York and New Jersey turned out some 2,000 gallons of grain alcohol every day. The ring worked from the basement, and its delivery trucks passed as grocery vans.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
Further reading
- Furs, Motorcars and Bootleg Liquor -- Nos. 165-167 Mercer StreetDaytonian in Manhattan
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