244 Madison Avenue

also 20 East 38th Street, 242 Madison Avenue | Midtown | built 1916

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. 1866

    Sugar refiner Theodore Havemeyer buys this corner and builds a Second Empire mansion on it

    Theodore A. Havemeyer, a 27-year-old partner in his father's sugar refinery, Havemeyer & Elder, bought the corner of Madison Avenue and 38th Street in 1866. The four-story brownstone he and his wife Emily built here, entered from a carriage court behind an elaborate iron fence, was among the first Second Empire houses in New York and the grandest in Murray Hill. It stood on this site until the present building replaced it in 1915 and 1916.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1897

    April 26

    Theodore Havemeyer is baptized a Catholic on his deathbed and dies in the mansion on this site

    Havemeyer fell ill in April 1897 after a trip south. Told that his end was near, he sent for Father Michael C. O'Farrell of the Church of the Holy Innocents, who baptized him a Catholic, and he died in the house early on April 26. Archbishop Michael Corrigan said his requiem mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral before more than 3,000 mourners.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1908

    December 22

    Katherine Mackay founds the Equal Franchise Society in the Havemeyer mansion

    Emily Havemeyer leased the house to Clarence Mackay around 1905, and his wife, Katherine Duer Mackay, filled it with dinners and musicales. On December 22, 1908 she organized the Equal Franchise Society here, a suffrage group working to win women the vote in national, state and local elections, and the society made the mansion its regular meeting place.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1915

    July

    The Havemeyer mansion is sold and torn down for a 16-story building despite Murray Hill's protests

    With Emily Havemeyer dead in 1914 and no tenant to be found, the 244 Madison Avenue Company bought the house in July 1915 to put up a 16-story building. The Murray Hill Association tried to stop it with the residential restrictions the Murray heirs had placed on their old estate in 1847, but this lot had been sold the year before they took effect. Within months the mansion was gone and August Heckscher's building, designed by Jardine, Hill & Murdock, was rising.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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All 178 buildings with stories in Midtown