435 Broome Street

SoHo | built 1873

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. 1873

    Catherine Wilkins hires W. A. Potter to build a cast-iron Gothic store with sunflower ornament

    Real-estate investor Catherine Wilkins demolished the old brick house, which had been a piano and organ store, and commissioned William Appleton Potter, fresh from Princeton's Chancellor Green Library. He gave the building pencil-thin columns, Gothic tracery on the top floor and rows of cast-iron sunflowers, an Aesthetic Movement motif. The date 1873 sits in the pediment, and Wilkins quickly sold the building.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1893

    December 7

    A woman sues relatives, then is accused of setting an attack dog on her husband's lawyer

    Henry Rogers ran a novelty business here in 1893 when his sister-in-law Catherine Rogers sued him for $100,000, blaming him for her husband leaving her. She also brought an assault case against her husband's lawyer, John Shea, who testified that she had urged a dog on him in her hallway. The Evening World reported that the court dismissed her claims.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1898

    June

    William Waldorf Astor buys the building for $75,000

    In June 1898 real-estate operator S. Van Rensselaer Cruger sold the building to William Waldorf Astor for $75,000. By 1906 Astor also owned the adjoining Broadway buildings at Nos. 484 and 486. His family held 435 Broome until 1925.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1912

    July

    A trunk maker whose Bowery factory was damaged by fire moves into the building

    In July 1912 the trade magazine Luggage and Leather Goods reported that A. Lercher, a leather trunk manufacturer, had moved here after a fire damaged his factory at 101 Bowery. He took the whole building, with an office and salesroom on the ground floor and manufacturing above, and stayed into the 1920s.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1976

    The Women in the Arts Foundation runs a gallery for women artists in the building

    By 1976 the building was a base for two groups, the Ambrose Arts Foundation, which ran a performing arts venue, and the Women in the Arts Foundation, whose gallery showed work only by its female members. The loft later became the Puffin Room, a gallery and performing arts center that opened in 1995 and held an annual Loft Show for artists it considered SoHo's modern pioneers.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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