319 Church Street

also 36 Lispenard Street | Tribeca | built 1876

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. 1838

    David Ruggles shelters Frederick Douglass at 36 Lispenard Street, an earlier building on this corner

    Before the present building went up, the corner of Church and Lispenard Streets held the house of the Black abolitionist David Ruggles. He ran a bookstore and printed anti-slavery pamphlets there, and hid fugitives from slavery on their way north; an estimated 600 passed through. His best-known guest, in 1838, was Frederick Douglass, who stayed hidden for several days. This was an earlier building on the site.

    Source: Ephemeral New York

  2. 1875

    A lawyer and an insurance broker replace the old corner buildings with a five-story loft

    Charles E. Appleby, an attorney, and Aaron H. Rathbone, an insurance broker, commissioned architect William Widmayer to build the store and loft building. It went up in 1875-76 and stood on the southeast corner of Church and Lispenard Streets. By his death in 1913 Appleby was among the largest individual holders of Manhattan real estate.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1890

    October

    A cloak manufacturer at 36 Lispenard Street fails and vanishes, with his stock

    In October 1890 the New York Herald reported that Max Wolff, a cloak maker working from the upper-floor entrance at 36 Lispenard Street, had failed. His many creditors were hunting for him, but he had disappeared, and not even his wife seemed to know where he was. Almost all of his stock vanished along with him.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1978

    The New York School for the Circus Arts is a tenant in the building

    By 1978, as Tribeca's loft buildings began to change uses, the New York School for the Circus Arts occupied space at the address. The school remained there at least through 1983, in a building that had been home to necktie makers, hosiery firms and a corner eating house since the 1870s.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 2007

    La Colombe opens its first New York cafe on the Church Street corner

    La Colombe Torrefaction opened in the corner storefront in 2007, the venture of Jean-Phillippe Iberti, a Philadelphia coffee importer and roaster, with his partners; the space had been a coffee shop and, a century earlier, an eating house. On August 21 Florence Fabricant, a critic for the New York Times, called it a cafe of brick walls that served espresso in china cups. A 2015 renovation added offices and apartments upstairs, with La Colombe still at street level.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 564 buildings with stories in Tribeca