Samuel Tredwell Skidmore House

37 East 4th Street | NoHo | built 1845

Open on the map10 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. 1845

    Skidmore buys two Persian rugs from William Sloane for his new house

    In 1845, the year the house was finished, Samuel Skidmore bought two Persian rugs from William Sloane's carpet store at 245 Broadway, paying $25 for each. Daytonian in Manhattan puts that near $750 apiece in today's money. Sloane's shop served the carriage trade, and it appears he was the first New York dealer to offer Persian rugs.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1845

    Samuel Tredwell Skidmore has a Greek Revival house built on East 4th Street

    Wholesale drug merchant Samuel Tredwell Skidmore hires the newly arrived English architects Thomas Thomas and Son to design a Greek Revival home three lots east of his cousin Seabury Tredwell's mansion. Red brick contrasts with brownstone trim, and the portico has free-standing fluted Ionic columns. The entrance has an unusual paneled door made to look like a pair of doors. The house is finished in 1845, and Skidmore and his wife Angelina have eight children.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1876

    June 26

    Mary Ann Banks, who served the Skidmore family for over 45 years, dies in the house

    Mary Ann Banks, an Irish-born nurse who came to the Skidmore household in 1830, dies at 37 East 4th Street after a stroke the previous autumn left her paralyzed. The New York Times reports that she was said to be more than 100 years old. She is buried in the Skidmore family lot at Greenwood Cemetery.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1881

    November 8

    Samuel Tredwell Skidmore dies in the house after almost four decades there

    Skidmore, a wholesale druggist who later headed the Howard Insurance Company and became a trustee of the U.S. Trust Company, died in the house on November 8, 1881. He had lived there with his wife Angelina and their eight children for nearly forty years, and had been a Trinity Church vestryman from 1845 and its Senior Warden from 1874. His widow sold the property in 1883.

    “In 1883, after Mr. Skidmore's death here on November 8, 1881, his widow sold the house.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  5. 1893

    July 8

    A teenage skirt dancer is kicked by her husband in a rented apartment and found unconscious in the street

    By 1893 the old mansion took tenants. On the night of Saturday, July 8, the skirt dancer Lillian Payne, a teenager just back from a Jersey City theater, reached home around 2 a.m. Her husband, the electrician Arthur Payne, accused her of lying, seized her by the throat, threw her against a wall and kicked her. A patrolman found her unconscious on the wet pavement in front of No. 85 about 3 a.m., and Payne was arrested and held without bail, denying the attack.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  6. 1970

    August 18

    The city designates the Skidmore House a landmark

    New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission designates 37 East 4th Street an individual landmark, recognizing the 1845 Greek Revival rowhouse built for merchant Samuel Tredwell Skidmore. The house is added to the National Register of Historic Places in January 1980 and to the New York State Register that June.

    Source: Wikipedia

  7. 1973

    Barbara Hirschl opens the Touchstone gallery on the first floor

    In 1973 Barbara Hirschl opened Touchstone in the ground-floor rooms, a gallery for artists who had never shown in New York. New York magazine admired the long room, with its two fireplaces, white walls, high ceilings and carved pine windows and doors. A year later the Times critic John Russell, reviewing an Otello Guardacci exhibition, called it one of the prettiest houses in town.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  8. 1994

    Squatters leave the landmark just before a fire, probably arson, hits it

    After the developer Sol Goldman died in 1987, a family of squatters lived in the house, which he had taken over in the 1970s while tearing down neighboring buildings for new development. They moved out in 1994, shortly before a fire that was likely arson. By then graffiti covered the building.

    Source: Wikipedia

  9. 2004

    December

    A judge orders the owners to restore the collapsing landmark after the city sues

    By the 2000s the roof had caved in, the windows were bricked up, and fires and wall collapses had stripped away shutters, doorknobs and the stairway newel post. The Landmarks Preservation Commission took the estate of Sol Goldman to court, and in December 2004 Justice Walter B. Tolub ordered the owners to permanently repair and restore the exterior. Commission chairman Robert Tierney said demolition by neglect would not be tolerated.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  10. 2010

    November

    A $4 million restoration converts the derelict house into apartments

    After decades of neglect under the Sol Goldman owners, the Greek Revival house is close to collapse, and a 2004 court ruling orders its owners to repair the exterior. The Atlantic Development Group, which has leased the abandoned house, works with the Landmarks Preservation Commission and architects who study period houses and the original drawings. The $4 million restoration and conversion to apartments is finished by November 2010.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 222 buildings with stories in NoHo