John Allen House

44 Commerce Street | West Village | built 1838

Open on the map3 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. 1838

    John Allen builds a three-story Greek Revival house on the curve of Commerce Street

    John Allen put up this brick house in 1838, when Commerce Street was filling with new homes and almost no businesses. Three full stories tall, it chose the newly emerging Greek Revival over the older Federal manner, with brownstone lintels and sills and a plain wooden cornice. Its modest size still showed Allen's success.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1885

    February 10

    A resident drinks a bottle of absinthe, then stabs a man seven times after a Tammany Hall ball

    William Maighan, an Irish-born American Express driver living here, went to the Tough Club's annual ball at Tammany Hall on February 9, 1885, after unknowingly drinking a whole bottle of absinthe he took for whiskey. Early the next morning, outside a house on Varick Place, he quarrelled with delivery clerk C. B. Williams and stabbed him seven times. Maighan remembered nothing and was arrested by Detective Thomas Reynolds eleven days later.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1938

    The one-family house is split into apartments and later returned to a single home

    No. 44 stayed a one-family home through the Great Depression. In 1938 it was divided into one apartment per floor, the entrance moved down from the parlor floor to the basement, and the Flemish-bond brickwork was covered in stucco. In 2008 it became a single-family house again, with the brownstone stoop restored and the stucco stripped from the brick.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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