29 Cottage Place
Port Richmond | built 1848
Open on the map4 entries
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.
- 1848
Farmer Abraham Merrell builds a saltbox cottage on Cottage Place to rent out
Abraham L. Merrell, a farmer living in Bulls Head, paid marble cutter Orlando W. Buel $260 for this lot after Buel had owned it a little over a year, and probably put up the house soon after. Merrell stayed on his farm and rented the cottage out; census records suggest boatman Henry Prall and his wife Elizabeth lived here by 1850. Later likely tenants included a cooper, a carver and a Norwegian-born blacksmith.
- 1918
The Schmidt family, tenants since about 1899, buy the house
By 1899 Frederick Schmidt, also known as Smith, a German immigrant who worked in a plaster mill, was living here as a tenant along with his wife Annie and three children. In 1918 their daughter Lena Sophia Schmidt bought it from Elizabeth Bruce Decker, widow of owner David Decker. The Schmidt family kept the house until 1941; in 1930 the widowed Anna Schmidt had two Norwegian carpenters boarding with her.
- 1920
The Schmidts raise the saltbox house three feet and give it a Craftsman look
In 1920 the Schmidts lifted the house three feet onto a basement of rusticated concrete block and replaced its front porch with a one-story flat-roofed porch on square posts. The old spring eave and porch columns were probably lost in the work. The house kept its saltbox profile, with a short front roof slope and long rear slope, and its Greek Revival doorway with original sidelights and transom.
- 1986
John Foxell buys the house and adds prayer and spirit houses and signs honoring Dorothy Day
John Foxell bought the house in 1986 and changed its exterior and grounds, building a prayer house on the south lawn and a spirit house on the north lawn. He also put up signs commemorating Dorothy Day, the Catholic activist and journalist who kept a cottage at Staten Island's Spanish Camp. Despite these changes, the house still keeps its original form and window pattern.
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