240 West 14th Street

West Village | built 1910

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. 1889

    The Arlington League, a nonpartisan social club, takes the parlor floor and basement and adds bowling alleys

    A club founded in 1883 leased the parlor and basement of this former mansion in late 1889. The New York Times described it as the jolliest social group in the Ninth Ward, where Tammany men, County Democrats and Republicans mixed freely. The basement bowling alley was the new attraction, and by April 1890 the club was hosting matches against teams from Jersey City, with the New York Bicycle Club sharing the lanes the next year.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1919

    July 7

    Edward Verges shoots his wife Marie at her boarding house, and her daughter Antoinette leaps from a window the next day

    Marie Verges, widow of a Mexican general killed during the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, married Edward Verges in Mexico City in December 1918 and soon learned he was a penniless widower, not the Spanish nobleman he had posed as. After she and her 18-year-old daughter, Antoinette, took rooms at No. 240 in June 1919, he followed them from work on July 7 and fired six shots. Two bullets hit Marie in the back and one slightly wounded Antoinette in the shoulder; Verges was caught at Eighth Avenue and tried to poison himself in the station house. The next day Antoinette turned on the gas and then flung herself from a window, fracturing her skull, and she died on July 15.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1921

    June 24

    A cheap clothesline snaps under Jack Lippman as he climbs down to his estranged wife's window

    Jack Lippman, who moved into No. 240 after separating from his wife Irene in 1919, spent two years trying to reach her at her furnished room on East 80th Street. Learning that her roommate was away every Monday night, he bought a clothesline for $1.92, took along a revolver and a butcher knife, and at 4:30 a.m. on June 24, 1921, began lowering himself from a chimney toward her window. The rope, frayed by his swinging over the edge, parted, and the Tribune reported he lay dying in Bellevue Hospital that night.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1933

    June 14

    Painter Paul Meltsner is evicted from his top-floor studio over about $200 in back rent

    Meltsner, 28, had trained at the National Academy of Design, won a Tiffany Foundation fellowship and exhibited across the country, yet he fell behind on rent after moving in during 1931. A city marshal put him and his canvases on the curb on June 14, 1933, and passing friends lent him enough for a van to Sixth Avenue. The Social Realist Raphael Soyer, married in 1931, also lived and kept his studio in the building at this time.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1984

    Quatorze, a French bistro, opens in the old basement bowling alley

    The lower level, once the Arlington League's bowling alley and later a plumbing shop and a doctor's office, became a restaurant in 1984. Times food editor Marian Burros reviewed Quatorze in September of that year, when it was about two months old, and praised its proper bistro trappings. It lasted more than a decade; chef Frank Crispo opened an Italian trattoria, Crispo, in the same space in September 2002.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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