The Lyceum

35 Grove Street | also 33 Grove Street | West Village | built 1888

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. 1888

    James Kyle & Sons replace three old houses with the Lyceum flats, advertised with a Turkish bath

    The developers, who also managed their own buildings, demolished the old houses at 33 to 37 and hired Frederick T. Camp to design three five-story flats. Camp filed plans on March 23, 1888, and work took about eight months. A December 1888 Sun advertisement offered four-room apartments for $22 to $25, with a Turkish bath, carpets and plate-glass mirrors.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1891

    December 8

    A swindler takes $2.05 from a Lyceum tenant by claiming her son was jailed for theft

    On December 8, 1891 Charles Hahr came to Julia Lawson's door at No. 37 and said her messenger-boy son was held at the Gerry Society for stealing $20. If she paid the $20, the boy could go free. She had only $2.05, which Hahr took, promising she could pay the rest in installments. The boy came home that evening, innocent. Within two weeks Hahr and his brother were arrested on suspicion of being flat-house thieves.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1895

    January 19

    Schoolboys found a league against cigarettes in a Lyceum apartment

    Austin Chester Bamford, a pupil at Grammar School No. 69, and his friends worried about smoking at school and founded what they called the Confederated League, a union of anti-cigarette clubs across New York City. Its first meeting was held in his apartment on January 19, 1895. Among the rules adopted was that the president must be a first-grade pupil. The New York Times reported the boys hoped to drive the habit from the city's public schools.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1906

    February 13

    An architect shoots a chef's wife and then himself in a fourth-floor apartment

    Ernest Etienne, a chef at the Hotel Brevoort, and his wife Leonora lived at No. 35 from 1904. On February 13, 1906 the architect Louis Faresin, who had been visiting her while Ernest was at work, shot Leonora three times and then himself. A houseguest from Paris overheard the scene. Leonora died shortly afterward. Ernest came home about half an hour after the coroner arrived and claimed that he had neither met nor heard of the man.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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