48 Bedford Street
also 27 7th Avenue South | West Village | built 1890
Open on the map3 entries
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.
- 1890
Developer William Rankin has James W. Cole design an Italianate tenement for eleven families on Seventh Avenue South
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Rankin built the five-story tenement in 1889-90, at a time when row houses across Greenwich Village were being replaced by apartment buildings for working-class and immigrant families. James W. Cole drew up the stone-fronted Italianate design, which was meant to hold eleven households.
- 1910
The 1910 census finds ten families here, nine of Irish or German parentage and one Italian
Census takers in 1910 recorded ten families living in the tenement. Nine were second-generation Americans whose parents had come from Ireland and Germany, and one was a first-generation Italian immigrant family. Among the household heads were a sign-hanger, a schoolteacher, a grocer, a mirror setter and a washerwoman.
- 1914
The tenement loses its northern bay when Seventh Avenue is cut through the Village at an angle
In 1914 architect Charles B. Meyers rebuilt the building after its northernmost bay was sliced away for the extension of Seventh Avenue, which ran diagonally across the old street grid and was completed by 1917. The new angled corner was faced in brownstone to match the original front, and a new entrance with Colonial Revival details was added. The city owned the building by 1920, according to the deed records.
“…the northernmost bay of the three-bay building was shaved off to make way for the extension of Seventh Avenue through the neighborhood…”
Nearby
- 46 Bedford Street2 entries
- 25 Leroy Street2 entries
- 44 Bedford Street2 entries
- 29 7th Avenue South1 entry
- 23 Leroy Street2 entries
- 36 Leroy Street1 entry