45 Carmine Street

West Village | built 1887

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.

1887
Caspar Hirtler has two matching Queen Anne tenements built at 45 and 47 Carmine Street
William Graul designed the pair in 1887 for owner Caspar Hirtler. Each building held shops on the ground floor and two families on every floor above. They rose as part of a wave in which Greenwich Village's older Federal and Greek Revival row houses were being torn down for tenements that housed working-class and immigrant families.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
1930
By 1930 every family at 45-47 Carmine Street is Italian, where 1900 had brought a mix of Europeans
The 1900 census found sixteen families in the two tenements, mostly first-generation immigrants from Germany, Ireland, England, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland. By 1930 the seventeen households were all Italian, fourteen of them first-generation. Residents worked as a lithographer, an automobile painter, a bondsman, a dress designer and a street cleaner, among other jobs.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
1954
Architects Wechsler & Schimenti merge the two tenements and give them a modern buff-brick front
In 1954 the old tenements at 45 and 47 Carmine Street were joined into a single building. The storefronts came out and architects Wechsler & Schimenti built an entirely new facade of buff brick. The result reads from the street as a mid-century apartment house, hiding its 1887 origins.
Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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