William Huyler House

42 Bedford Street | West Village | built 1836

Open on the map5 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. 1836

    Mason William Huyler finishes a Flemish-bond brick house at 42 Bedford Street

    William Huyler, a master mason who put up several other houses in the neighborhood, started this two-and-a-half-story house in 1835 and finished it the next year, probably acting as his own architect. It had red brick laid in Flemish bond, a low stoop and brownstone trim. It looks to have been an investment from the start: boarders, such as a schoolteacher named Mary Griffin, were living here by 1842.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1918

    December

    A tenant's gas bill jumps to $7.36 and the company blames its women meter readers

    In 1918 Frederick Rabbe sold the house to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Matthew, and a tenant named Mrs. A. Nunan lived here at the time. In December she opened her gas bill and found $7.36 for November, against $2.72 for October. She took her complaint to the Consolidated Gas Company office at 15th Street and Irving Place. The company pointed to its women meter readers as the cause, and The Evening World reported on December 27 that they were being dispensed with.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1930

    Architect Ferdinand Savignano gives the house a Colonial Revival front before it becomes a restaurant

    In 1930 the house was renovated in the Village-wide fashion for quaint, bohemian touches. Architect Ferdinand Savignano removed the stoop and set a street-level door with a fanlight and arched brick surround below a triptych window made for a flower box, and the facade was covered in stucco. The peaked roof was probably swapped for a stepped parapet then. The Landmarks Preservation Commission notes the dwelling became a restaurant in 1931.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  4. 1935

    Mary's Restaurant opens in the little house and serves Italian food for decades

    From 1935 Mary's Restaurant operated from the converted house, serving Italian cooking in the Italian part of the Village. The owners, Mary and Pasquale D'Agosto, lived on the premises, and by the 1950s their two children, who shared their parents' names, were in the public schools. The restaurant became a neighborhood fixture that stayed in business well into the 1990s.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1971

    February 5

    Food critic Craig Claiborne praises the pasta at tiny Mary's Restaurant

    On February 5, 1971, the food critic Craig Claiborne wrote that he had found some of the best pasta he had eaten anywhere outside Italy at Mary's, and that most of its other dishes beat the New York average. He described a two-level place with a basement kitchen opening onto a dining room that held only four or five tables, and a slightly larger room upstairs.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 1,156 buildings with stories in West Village