233 Bleecker Street

also 237 Bleecker Street, 235 Bleecker Street, 15 Carmine Street | West Village | built 1822

Open on the map5 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. 1822

    A carpenter builds a frame house at Bleecker and Carmine, and a stagecoach house follows behind it

    Hixon Wilson, a carpenter, put up a two-story wood house on this corner in 1822. In 1832 he sold the lot to dry goods merchant Samuel Harris, who opened a store in the Carmine Street part. Harris also built a wooden stagecoach house on the rear lot, now 237 Bleecker Street, around 1835. It was perhaps meant for a stage line running between Bowling Green and Bleecker Street.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1837

    Bookseller Abraham Maze opens a shop at 237 Bleecker Street that lasts for decades

    By 1837 the former coach house was listed as the shop of Abraham Maze, a bookseller who also sold stationery and bound books to order. On New Year's Eve 1842 the New-York Tribune named his small Greenwich Village store among the great Broadway booksellers. He kept it going for about four decades, and a stationers' directory still listed a Maze bookstore here in 1896.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1841

    July 20

    Maze's bookshop also sells patent cures as good as a family doctor

    On July 20, 1841 Abraham Maze advertised Dr. Plumleight's Indian Botanic Plaister in the New-York Tribune as a cure for sore legs, rheumatism and many other ailments. A year later he offered a black salve and pills claimed to treat everything from fever sores to rattlesnake bites. His ad claimed the pills were as good as a family physician kept at hand.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1875

    Bookseller Maze dies, and Orange County sues his estate over the wife who left him

    Abraham Maze died in 1875 leaving about $2,000. Soon afterward the Superintendent of the Poor of Orange County sued the estate to recover the cost of supporting Maze's wife, who had left him about a year after their wedding and was later declared insane. The Supreme Court ruled against the county, holding that a husband who had no notice of the proceedings owed no support.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1969

    October 5

    The Sunshine Fruit and Vegetable Market owner says she is closing after about 40 years, blaming rising rents

    Josephine Majiotta's family had run the Sunshine Fruit and Vegetable Market in the old wooden building since the early Depression. On October 5, 1969, she told The New York Times she was getting out the next month because the landlord was raising the rent, and that everyone on the street planned to sell. Italian cheese, meat and bread shops in the area were being replaced by clothing and antiques stores. A pet-food store later took the space.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 1,156 buildings with stories in West Village