425 East 139th Street

Mott Haven | built 1892

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.

1892
Developers O'Gorman and Stursberg complete 425 East 139th Street in a uniform brick row
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No. 425 is one of twenty-one matching two-story-and-basement houses that survive from a 51-house rental row completed in 1892 by the partners William O'Gorman and Hermann Stursberg, with O'Gorman as architect. Stursberg's realty company held on to No. 425, along with ten other houses in the row, until the mid-1940s. The row's eastern houses, Nos. 449 to 503, were torn down in the 1960s to make room for P.S. 40 and its playground.
“Hermann Stursberg's realty company retained the first five buildings in the row (Nos. 403 to 411) and six others (Nos. 425, 427, 429, 431, 443 and 445)…”
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
1900
Turn-of-the-century census finds German and Irish families renting houses in this row
Census records from around 1900 show that the houses in this row and its twin on East 140th Street were rented mostly by German and Irish immigrants or their children, many sharing the house with relatives and a servant. Heads of household worked as clerks, salesmen, tailors, iron workers, picture framers and insurance agents; the two rows also housed a wool importer, a glue broker, a horse dealer, a pilot, a fire chief, a newspaper editor and a physician.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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