275 Canal Street

SoHo | built 1878

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. 1878

    Henry Pellew, a pallbearer at Theodore Roosevelt Sr.'s funeral, hires Charles C. Haight to design 275 Canal Street

    Henry E. Pellew bought the empty gore lot at 275 Canal Street on October 19, 1870 and waited eight years to build. In 1878 he hired 37-year-old architect Charles Coolidge Haight for a loft and store building. While Haight was drawing the plans, Pellew served as a pallbearer on February 12 at the funeral of Theodore Roosevelt Sr., father of the future president.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1878

    Charles C. Haight gives 275 Canal Street Romanesque Revival arches and a Queen Anne cornice

    Haight's building was finished within a year of commissioning. Arched openings on the fourth and fifth floors show the Romanesque Revival style he returned to for decades, while dog-tooth brick panels and a pierced cornice flanked by stone gablets bring in Queen Anne touches. Stone capitals top the pilasters and clustered columns on the upper floors.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1879

    November 17

    A janitor's theft of Black Friar ribbon from Eastman, Bigelow & Dayton on Canal Street sends a tailor to State Prison

    Silk and dry goods merchants Eastman, Bigelow & Dayton, an early tenant of the building, lost more than $700 of silk velvet ribbon. In October 1879 a customer said the firm's branded Black Friar ribbon was being sold cheap. The trail ran from a janitor to a mattress maker and then to a tailor's brother, who claimed he had taken it as payment for suits. Judge Gildersleeve sentenced the tailor to three years on November 17.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1893

    William Harvey's cane and umbrella-handle factory at 275 Canal Street employs 44 workers, mostly women and girls

    In 1893 the factory of William Harvey, maker of canes and umbrella handles, employed eight men, 18 women, 14 girls under 21 and four girls under 16. Workers put in long weeks, recorded as 59 hours during the week plus nine on Saturday. Harvey's firm reorganized around 1898 as the Harvey & Watts Co.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1933

    November

    The Pellew family sells 275 Canal Street after 63 years, and the factory floors become showrooms

    Marion and Charles E. Pellew sold the building to the Myr-Mil Holding Company in November 1933, 63 years after their father bought the lot. The new owners altered it to remove factory space, finishing in 1935 with a ground-floor store and showrooms above. A drugstore occupied the ground floor in 1961, when a three-alarm fire on February 20 burned through three floors but left Haight's facade intact.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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