Jonas and Henrietta Phillips House

36 West 12th Street | Greenwich Village | built 1860

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. 1863

    Jonas Phillips, a former acting mayor, buys the house for his family

    Jonas N. Phillips, a former ship chandler turned city surveyor who was president of the Common Council in 1856 and acting mayor of New York in 1857, bought 36 West 12th Street with his second wife, Henrietta, in 1863. The family held a high place in the city's Sephardic Jewish community. In January 1864, his daughter Rachel Rosalie wrote in her diary of being introduced to President and Mrs. Lincoln at the White House.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1924

    Future Pulitzer winner Margaret Leech rents an apartment here

    Margaret Leech, a Vassar graduate working for Conde Nast, took an apartment at 36 West 12th Street in 1924. Her novel The Feathered Nest, which was published in 1928, was written while she lived here. That year she married Ralph Pulitzer, publisher Joseph Pulitzer's eldest son, and moved to a mansion. She later won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1942 and again in 1960.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1943

    Cook James Beard moves into a rear apartment with a closet for a kitchen

    James Beard, then a fledgling cook, moved into a rear second-floor apartment at 36 West 12th Street in 1943, where the kitchen was a converted closet with no sink. Fearing that being known as gay could ruin him professionally, he later rented the empty first-floor apartment for his companion Gino Cofacci. Cofacci took the bedroom there, while Beard used the rest as an office and kept his official bedroom upstairs. Beard moved away around 1957.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1992

    A restoration returns No. 36 to its 1860 appearance

    In 1918, owner Arthur Townsend had the stoop removed and big studio windows put in for artist tenants, a common conversion for Greenwich Village rowhouses then. A restoration begun in 1985 and finished in 1992 undid those changes, refabricating the stoop and its ironwork and replacing the top-floor studio windows with careful reproductions of the 1860 originals.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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