254 West 14th Street

also 74 8th Avenue | West Village | built 1930

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. 1880

    December 16

    Seventeen-year-old Margaret Hammel, missing from her boarding house, tells a court she was not abducted

    The Hammel family boarded at what was then a respectable boarding house. When Margaret did not come home in December 1880, she was found at the West 53rd Street home of Frank Day, who was arrested on a charge of enticing her away. At the hearing on December 16 she testified that he had not abducted her, so he was released and her parents took her home.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1931

    A drugstore opens at street level while a handwriting-analysis society meets upstairs

    By 1931 the old brick house had a pharmacy on the ground floor and a meeting room above. The American Graphological Society, a group devoted to handwriting analysis, held its monthly meetings upstairs. The drugstore was replaced in the early 1940s by a restaurant.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1944

    June 1

    Pappas Restaurant is hit with an injunction over alleged wartime ceiling-price violations

    Paul G. Morfogen founded and ran the Pappas Restaurant here in the early 1940s. On June 1, 1944, the Times reported that the Office of Price Administration had obtained an injunction against it over alleged violations of ceiling prices. Diners stayed loyal: in 1953 the officers of the Grace Line ship Santa Barbara held a farewell dinner for retiring Captain Duncan Cook at the restaurant, which was still busy when Morfogen died in 1955.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 2017

    October

    Permits for full demolition are issued for the surviving brick houses at Nos. 254 and 256

    Nos. 254 and 256, originally numbered 132 and 134, were a pair of three-story brick houses that survived on this block while neighbors were replaced by apartment buildings and other new construction. By the end of the twentieth century No. 256 held a liquor store and later a bodega, and both houses stood vacant by 2017. In October of that year the city issued permits to demolish both completely.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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