Grosvenor Buildings
385 Broadway | Tribeca | built 1876
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.
- 1874
Fire sweeps the three floors of the earlier building at 385 Broadway
The three-story building that stood at 385 Broadway before the present one caught fire at 6:30 p.m. on November 28, 1874. A dress-trimmings merchant had the ground floor, pocketbook makers leased the third floor and attic, and the second floor held workrooms of the Celluloid Novelty Company, which made jet jewelry. Flames reached all three floors before they were put out, and the Times estimated the loss at $2,000. Its owner, Matilda Grosvenor, began replacing it and the neighboring building at No. 387 the next year.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1876
Charles Wright designs the Grosvenor Buildings as two Second Empire cast-iron stores that read as one
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Matilda Grosvenor and Charlotte Grosvenor Goodridge had architect Charles Wright design this five-story cast-iron store and loft building, put up in 1875-76 where three converted dwellings had stood. It is really two buildings sharing a party wall, but Wright gave them one Second Empire front with engaged columns, curved-cornered windows and a pedimented cornice lettered Grosvenor Buildings, 1875. A smaller Grosvenor building, dated 1869, stands at 64-66 White Street.
“It was designed by Charles Wright for Matilda Grosvenor and Charlotte Grosvenor Goodridge.”
- 1986
Project III Ensemble Theater opens in the Grosvenor Buildings with Günter Grass's play Flood
The new Project III Ensemble Theater took space here in 1986, in a building whose floors had long held dry-goods and apparel firms. The company opened with a staging of Günter Grass's Flood on June 1, which won praise from Walter Goodman, the drama critic of the New York Times. By 1999 a different performance venue, Soundance Theatre, was in the building. It was vacated in 2018, with a construction shed screening the ground floor during renovation.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
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