Switzer Institute and Home

27 Christopher Street | also 173 Waverly Place | West Village | built 1911

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. 1910

    May 7

    The Switzer Memorial Institute buys a three-story brick house at 27 Christopher for a girls' home

    In May 1910 the Margaret and Sarah Switzer Memorial Institute bought a three-story brick house on this corner and the two beside it. Irish-born sisters Margaret and Sarah Switzer had worked up from a dressmaker's shop to owning one and made a fortune; Margaret had died, so Sarah carried on alone. The old house was an earlier building on the site and was cleared for a home for working women.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1911

    December 11

    The Switzer Home for working girls is dedicated, with Sarah Switzer's own doormat at the door

    Architect Joseph Duke Harrison's four-story gray-brick building, planned at about $76,000, opened as a residence for respectable unmarried women aged 16 to 30 earning no more than $15 a week. Board cost $3.50 weekly, and evening classes taught dressmaking and stenography. Sarah Switzer skipped the ceremony, but she had paid for everything except a mat, so she sent her own, which still read '12 E. 33'.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1920

    February 27

    Sarah Switzer dies and leaves most of a half-million-dollar estate to her home

    Sarah Switzer died in her mid-70s in 1920. Most of her estate, about half a million dollars, went to the Margaret and Sarah Switzer Institute and Home. She also left $60,000 to her adviser Irving H. Bower, with a condition that whatever he had not spent at his death would pass to the home.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1932

    St. Joseph's Church buys the building for $210,000 and turns it into a girls' school

    As hotels for working girls closed during the Depression, St. Joseph's Church on Sixth Avenue bought the Switzer building in 1932. The parish used it as a girls' school, keeping its older building on Washington Place for boys, and later taught both here. Money troubles closed the Christopher Street school in 1977, when 240 children hauled their books, a Virgin Mary statue and a crucifix over to the old school.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 2014

    September

    The former nursing school and child-protection center sells for $45 million to become a single-family house

    After the school left, St. Vincent's Hospital School of Nursing rented the building until 2002, when it became the Fontana Center for Child Protection of the New York Foundling Hospital. The Foundling Hospital listed it for $47.5 million in March 2014, and it sold that September for $45 million. Plans filed that November called for a six-bedroom house with a 50-foot lap pool.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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