30 Downing Street

West Village | built 1885

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.

1835
A two-and-a-half-story house here is shared by a printer's and a carpenter's family
An earlier house stood on the site of 30 Downing Street, 21 feet wide and two and a half stories tall. In 1835 the printer Charles McDevitt and the carpenter James Scott each had a family under its roof. Around 1865 Francis Neppert, a Canal Street piano-stool maker, bought it purely as a rental, taking in seamen, cartmen, masons and a druggist over the next decade.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1885
October
Landlord Francis Neppert hires Andrew Spence to replace the old house with a neo-Grec dwelling
The Real Estate Record & Guide reported on October 17, 1885 that the owner, Francis Neppert, had commissioned architect Andrew Spence to design a four-story-and-basement dwelling at 30 Downing Street. It cost only $10,000. Spence gave it red brick with brownstone trim, line-carved lintels on brackets and a pressed-metal cornice, and it was laid out for two families.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1893
November
A tenant falls down an air shaft and the Herald reports he will die
On November 28, 1893, the New York Herald reported that John Hunt, who lived at 30 Downing Street, had fallen down the building's air shaft the previous Sunday. He was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital, and the paper stated flatly that he would die. The house had been built eight years earlier as a two-family dwelling.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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