Abraham Parsell House

46 MacDougal Street | SoHo | built 1826

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.

1827
Miniature painter Abraham Parsell paints ivory portraits at home
By 1827 Abraham Rykers Parsell, a miniature painter born in 1791 in Somerset, New Jersey, lived in this Federal house with his wife Mary and their young son John. Unlike most miniaturists, who traveled from city to city, he worked from his home for years, painting small oval portraits on ivory for lockets and pendant frames. He died in the house on February 10, 1856.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1856
Rev. Duncan Dunbar of the MacDougal Street Baptist Church uses the parlor as a chapel
After Abraham Parsell's death, his widow went to live with her son and the house was leased to Rev. Duncan Dunbar, a Scottish-born pastor of the Macdougal Street Baptist Church. The parlor sometimes served as a makeshift chapel, and Dunbar married Robert Allen and Ellen Lenihan there on October 9, 1858. He died on July 18, 1864.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1914
Nervo and Balbiani buy the house for their Italian bakery
In 1914 Pietro Nervo and Giuseppe Balbiani, partners in the P. Nervo, Balbiani & Co. bakery, bought 46 MacDougal and hired architect Frank E. Vitolo to alter the ground floor for their bakery. Six years later they bought 44 next door and had Vitolo expand the bakery into both houses. The partners' families lived above for decades, and the bakery space later became a commercial art gallery.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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