Jasper Ward House

45 Peck Slip | also 151 South Street | Financial District | built 1807

Open on the map4 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. 1807

    Merchant Jasper Ward erects a row of three brick buildings on newly filled land at Peck Slip

    Jasper Ward, a merchant, put up three similar four-story brick buildings under one hipped roof at Peck Slip in 1806-07, when the slip was still mostly water lots and the buildings rose on newly made land. No. 45, at the corner of South Street, keeps its original Flemish bond brick front, with splayed brownstone lintels and sills. The other two buildings of the row were demolished in 1962.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1807

    February 21

    Jasper Ward advertises counting-room space beside the Peck Slip pier

    On February 21, 1807, Ward ran an ad in the New York Evening Post offering a second-story counting-room and one or two floors in his four-story brick store at South Street and Peck Slip, and boasting that the pier in front was the most convenient in the city for loading and unloading. Henry B. Lambert opened a counting-room there on May 1, 1807, and stayed three years. Benjamin Deforest's import-export grocery business also moved in and operated from No. 45 for 17 years.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1925

    July

    A grand jury hears how the fish dealers' combination, including Acme Fish Co., fixes prices

    By the early 20th century South Street was the center of New York's wholesale fish trade, and Acme Fish Company worked the ground floor of No. 45 while the upper floors were a rooming house. In July 1925 a grand jury heard more than forty witnesses describe pressure to join a combination of eighteen wholesale dealers, Acme among them, that controlled over $20 million in sales a year. Acme's owner, David Finkelstein, was indicted for conspiracy to violate the Sherman Law, and the company stayed at No. 45 for at least another decade.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1973

    Con Edison agrees to build its substation around the derelict Jasper Ward House

    In 1962 the Inamly Corporation bought No. 45, and that year the other two buildings Ward had erected were demolished. In 1973 Con Edison announced plans for a big electrical substation that would have wiped out the last of them, but it agreed to build around the derelict building instead. It then gave No. 45 to the South Street Seaport Museum, founded only a few years earlier, and in 1983 the architect Robert E. Meadows led a restoration.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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All 276 buildings with stories in Financial District