420 East 136th Street
Mott Haven | built 1891
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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.
- 1891
Edward Bertine builds 420 in a ten-house Queen Anne row later known as the Bertine Block
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In 1891 developer Edward D. Bertine began ten houses at 414 to 432 East 136th Street, with George Keister as architect, in the Queen Anne style; No. 420 is one of them. The row was pictured in the 1897 book The Great North Side or Borough of the Bronx, and the first edition of the AIA Guide to New York City gave it the name "Bertine Block" in 1967. The landmarks report counts it among the finest rows put up in New York City in the late nineteenth century.
- 1891
No. 420's stained-glass transom still shows its original house number, 674
No. 420 pairs a pointed-arched doorway with a three-sided wooden oriel on its second story, flanked by small oval stained-glass windows. Angled brick piers rise on either side to a steep slate-clad pedimented gable, and a very tall corbeled chimney, shared with No. 422, climbs its east side. Over the door, the stained-glass transom still carries the number 674, the number it bore before the neighborhood's addresses were revised early in the 1900s.
“…a stained-glass transom, still emblazoned with the original address number of 674 (addresses on blocks in this area were changed in the early twentieth century)…”
- 1900
Real estate broker Alonzo Fogal occupies 420 with three daughters and two sons
The 1900 census recorded Alonzo Fogal, a real estate broker, living at No. 420 with his three daughters and two sons. That year Edward Bertine, the developer who built the row, lived a few doors away at No. 416 with his wife, Sophia, his daughter and a servant born in Europe.
Nearby
- 418 East 136th Street2 entries
- 422 East 136th Street3 entries
- 416 East 136th Street3 entries
- 424 East 136th Street3 entries
- 414 East 136th Street3 entries
- 426 East 136th Street2 entries