John William and Lydia Ann Bell Ahles House
39-24 213th Street | also 39-26 213th Street | Bayside | built 1901
Open on the map5 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.
- 1873
Farmer Robert M. Bell builds a house for his daughter Lillie and her husband, grain merchant Will Ahles
Around 1873 Bayside farmer Robert M. Bell built this Second Empire house as a gift to his daughter Lydia Ann (Lillie) Bell when she married John William Ahles in June 1873. Ahles became a flour merchant in 1877, joined the Produce Exchange and served for years on its Board of Governors. He was also a school trustee, a church warden and a breeder of trotting horses.
“Robert Bell also built houses on Bell Avenue... as a wedding present for his daughter Lydia (Lillie) on her marriage to John William Ahles in June 1873…”
- 1915
Will Ahles dies and leaves a lifetime income to his longtime coachman, Samuel Chapel
By 1910 Will Ahles shared the house with his daughter Virginia, his sister Frances and Samuel Chapel, an African-American coachman with the family since the 1890s. When Ahles died in 1915 he set up a trust paying lifetime incomes to his sister and to Chapel, with most of his property held for his children and their heirs. His wife Lillie had died in 1896.
“At his death in 1915, Ahles established a trust that provided life-time incomes for his sister and Chapel…”
- 1924
The house is moved to cut Christy Street through, and Lewis E. Welsh remakes it in Colonial Revival dress
In 1924 the house was moved from its first site so that Christy Street, now 213th Street, could be extended to 41st Avenue. Architect Lewis E. Welsh, who specialized in updating Victorian houses, took off the wrap-around porches, the bay window and the scroll brackets, covered the clapboards in stucco and added new porches and moldings. The mansard roof, cornice and boxy shape of the original survived.
“The house was moved from its original site to its present location in 1924 to allow Christy Street now 213th Street to be cut through…”
- 1935
An accountant, a banker and a city fireman take turns renting 39-24 213th Street
By then divided into a two-family rental, the house appears in the 1935 reverse telephone directory with accountant Robert E. Blessing at 39-24 213th Street. Banker Robert Crouch and his family replaced him the next year. New York City fireman Peter F. Gilbody and his family lived at 39-24 from 1943 until about 1953.
- 2016
The city designates the Ahles House a landmark over the owner's objections
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Ahles House on April 12, 2016, after hearings in 2009 and 2015. Supporters included Tony Avella, the Bayside Historical Society and Queens Borough Historian Jack Eichenbaum, while the owner opposed it at both hearings and again in 2016. The commission called it the last surviving example of the substantial Second Empire buildings put up in Bayside in the 1870s and 1880s.
Nearby
- Ahles House (39-26 213th Street)39-26 213th Street | 2 entries
- Cobblestone House35-34 Bell Boulevard | 4 entries
- Hawthorne Court Apartments215-37 43rd Avenue | 2 entries
- Hawthorne Court Apartments215-43 43rd Avenue | 3 entries
- James J. Corbett House221-04 Corbett Road | 3 entries
- Bayside High School32-24 Corporal Kennedy Street | 5 entries