5 Spring Street
Nolita | built 1900
Open on the map5 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.
- 1873
William Jose designs a cast-iron-fronted store and tenement for developer F. Herlein
A brick house and a small rear building on the lot were auctioned on June 17, 1873. A month later the architect William Jose filed plans for a five-story brownstone store and tenement, 25 feet wide, for the developer F. Herlein. His Italianate design had a cast-iron storefront with a triple arcade, and Joseph Hugo opened a bakery in the shop. By 1900 Mary Seibert ran it, baking in the basement and living upstairs.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1877
Clerks, carpenters and a letter carrier fill the new tenement
The 1877 tenants were blue-collar and middle-class: clerks, carpenters, a shoemaker, a hatter, a butcher, a cigarmaker and an awning maker, among others. Many were Irish-born, including the letter carrier Michael J. Riley, who lived here with his wife and five children. In 1884 he left a package of 125 letters in a Bond Street machine shop and was arrested for detaining the mails.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1891
The veteran Irish stage comedian Sam Erwin Ryan dies at 5 Spring Street
Sam Erwin Ryan, born in 1828, died in the building on November 15, 1891, at the age of 63. The New York Herald ranked him among the oldest Irish comedians on the American stage and noted that he had spent forty years in the theater. He was a widower.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1935
A tenant's stolen car plates turn up on gangster Pretty Amberg's burned car
Joseph Marino, who lived here in 1935, had his car stolen that September, and the thieves removed its plates. On October 24 the New York Times reported that the body of gangster Joseph "Pretty" Amberg had been found in a burning car in Brooklyn. It carried Marino's plates. Amberg and his chauffeur had been shot in a Brownsville garage on September 30.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 2016
The ground floor goes from the nightclub Sweet and Vicious to The Tavern
By the early 2000s the cast-iron storefront held Sweet and Vicious, a nightclub, a sign of how much Nolita had changed since the building housed bakers and tenement families. A renovation completed in 2016 modernized the storefront, which is now home to The Tavern. The paneled piers of the 1873 front survive, though its arched openings have been squared off or hidden by signs.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
Further reading
- William Jose's 1873 5 Spring StreetDaytonian in Manhattan
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