31 Carmine Street

West Village | built 1859

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.

1859
Lawrence Van Wart builds three narrow Italianate tenements at 31-33 Carmine Street
Read more
This building at 31 Carmine Street is one of three four-story tenements that Lawrence Van Wart put up about 1859, each planned for two families per floor above a ground-floor store. They are among the area's earliest tenements, and their narrow width and lack of air shafts show they predate the city's first tenement house law of 1879. Cast iron is used for the storefront piers and for the lintels and sills.
“…built well before the city's first tenement house law was passed in 1879…”
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
1930
Census records show 31-33 Carmine Street's tenants shifting from German and Irish households to Italian ones
Read more
In 1880 five families lived at 31 and 31 1/2, two of them native New Yorkers and three immigrant households from Germany and England, with occupations such as cabinet maker, piano polisher and wagon maker. By 1900 eleven families lived in the three buildings, ten of them immigrant or second-generation families from Ireland, Germany and France. The 1930 census recorded seven families at 31 1/2 and 33, all of them first-generation Italian immigrants working as typists, stationery packers, bakers, waiters and barbers.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Nearby