Site of the Thomas Paine house

309 Bleecker Street | West Village | built 1933

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. 1809

    May

    Ailing Thomas Paine leaves a wooden house on this site for a small house on Columbia Street

    An earlier building on this site, a two-and-a-half-story wooden house on Herring Street (later Bleecker), was the home of Thomas Paine after his years in France. He boarded there with the Ryders, alongside Madame Marguerite Bonneville and her two sons. As strokes made him an invalid, clergymen called to press him to recant The Age of Reason and were turned away. In May 1809 Madame Bonneville moved him to a small house on Columbia Street, and he died on June 8.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1876

    The old Paine house, once a confectionery, is a beer and billiard saloon

    The wooden house stood on this site, then numbered 309 Bleecker Street, and was a shop for most of the 19th century. By 1844 it housed J. Tabor's confectionery. Lee & Co., operating from the ground floor in 1855, was awarded a pair of diplomas at the Crystal Palace fair, including one for an enameled wire sign. By 1864 the lower floor was a meat and vegetable market, and by 1876 a beer and billiard saloon. New Yorkers still remembered the building as the Thomas Paine house.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1930

    March 9

    The Thomas Paine house is sold and slated for demolition, with no attempt to save it

    After about a century of ownership the Delaplaine family sold the old wooden house at 309 Bleecker Street to Alfred Heyman in February 1930. On March 9 the New York Times reported that the home of Thomas Paine would be demolished to make way for a modern building. No outcry or attempt to save it followed, and a one-story store of tile and brick took its place.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1958

    Two Depression-era buildings for Anna R. Crossin are merged into one food market in 1958

    The building at 309-311 Bleecker Street results from a 1958 alteration that combined two buildings put up in 1933 during the Depression. The owner was Anna R. Crossin and the architects were Scacchetti & Siegel. The plain brick structure, with a simple parapet above its store windows, serves as a food market.

    “This taxpayer is the result of an alteration of 1958, when two buildings, erected in 1933 during the Depression, were combined.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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