34 Commerce Street
West Village | built 1901
Open on the map3 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.
- 1867
A three-story house stands at 34 Commerce Street, where Eliza Kingsland's funeral is held
Before the factory, No. 34 was a three-story house. Its owners advertised the parlor and basement for rent in 1854, boasting marble mantels and folding doors, and by the early 1860s it was the home of the William Kingsland family. Eliza G. Kingsland's funeral took place there on August 7, 1867. By late 1869 the house was gone from the lot, and a patent-medicine firm was building there.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1869
A wagon shed permit at 32-34 Commerce Street becomes a patent-medicine factory
In November 1869 R. H. McDonald & Co. was reported to be erecting a one-story open wagon shed at Nos. 32 and 34, but a two-story brick factory went up within months. There McDonald made and sold Dr. J. Walker's California Vinegar Bitters, pitched as a temperance tonic. By 1872 he had moved the business to Washington Street after falling out with Walker, and in 1884 a Boston health official reported that the tonic was six percent alcohol.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1923
Artists including Edna St. Vincent Millay buy houses near Commerce and Bedford to stop developers
In October 1923 a group of Village artists, writers and performers, among them the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, bought a cluster of old houses around Commerce and Bedford Streets so apartment-house developers could not take them. The former factory at Nos. 32-34, long boarded up and run down, was converted to apartments soon afterward, though less glamorously than the houses restored as private homes.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
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