Irwin Building

2 Bleecker Street | also 316 Bowery | NoHo | built 1868

Open on the map5 entries

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1868

    Robert Irwin has Nicholas Whyte design an Italianate corner building at Bleecker Street and the Bowery

    Read more

    In 1868 Robert Irwin built a new Italianate corner building here to a design by the architect Nicholas Whyte, with a corner tower and a mansard roof. It went up as older houses in the neighborhood were giving way to new buildings. The building permit called it a store and dwelling, but it appears to have been used soon afterward as a store and warehouse.

    “…designed by architect Nicholas Whyte and built in 1868 for owner Robert Irwin…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1878

    Banker Robert Irwin is sued for $89,500 after his Bond Street Savings Bank fails

    Robert Irwin, the banker who had commissioned this corner building a decade earlier, ran into trouble in 1878 when his Bond Street Savings Bank failed and the receiver sued him personally for $89,500. John Boyd held the building briefly by 1880, and in 1883 it passed to Abraham Ettinger.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1913

    Banker Jacob H. Schiff buys the building after a foreclosure and adds a Bleecker Street storefront

    Abraham Ettinger, who had owned the building since 1883, lost it to foreclosure in 1913. Eugene H. Paul took it over and soon resold it to the millionaire banker Jacob H. Schiff, who had the architects E. H. Janes and A. W. Cordes design a new storefront on the Bleecker Street side. The building, converted to a hotel in 1894, was by then used as a store and factory.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1938

    Berenice Abbott photographs the hardware store at 316-318 Bowery for her Changing New York project

    In 1938 Berenice Abbott photographed the hardware store at 316-318 Bowery, one of the storefronts she turned her large-format camera on for Changing New York, the project the Federal Art Project began sponsoring in 1935. The picture, now in the New Orleans Museum of Art, shows an abundance of goods for repairing things around the house. The museum's curator reads it as a sign of Depression-era customers making what they owned last longer.

    Source: noma.org

  5. 1965

    The Bleecker Street Theater Workshop is based at 316-318 Bowery in the mid-1960s

    In the mid-1960s the Bleecker Street Theater Workshop was based in this building. Over the years its long-standing occupants had included Morris Feuer Hardware, the Bleecker Hardware Co., two hat makers and Action Display Forms. By the 1960s loft dwellers were beginning to take over the upper stories as the decline of manufacturing left space empty.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Nearby

All 222 buildings with stories in NoHo