42 Westervelt Avenue

New Brighton | built 1874

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.

1863
Jane Elliott buys two lots for the family of a Manhattan seed merchant
In 1863 Jane Elliott, whose husband William ran a florist and seed business in Manhattan, bought two 25-foot lots here and merged them into one. The family's frame house appears on an 1874 map with a porch across its front, and a two-story stable stood at the back of the deep lot by 1885. The Elliotts lived here at least until the mid-1880s.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
1898
A porch returns to the front of the mansard-roofed house
Maps of the 1880s and 1890s show no front porch, but one is drawn again on the 1898 map, and the enclosed Colonial Revival porch may date from then. The clapboard upper facade survives largely unaltered, with paired brackets, pedimented dormers in a slate mansard and a cornice panel bearing the date 1872, which a recent owner added.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
1900
The Sillcox family lives in the former Bernbaum boarding house
In the early 1890s a Mrs. Bernbaum ran the house as a boarding house, but by 1900 the Sillcox family was living here. For many years in the early twentieth century Dr. Isidore Scheinberg kept his dental office in the building, and in the 1920s Frank Featherston, a clerk at the Procter & Gamble soap factory, rented an apartment.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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