50 8th Avenue

West Village | built 1845

Open on the map3 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. 1845

    Asher Hamlin builds No. 50 Eighth Avenue in a row of eleven identical three-story houses with shops

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    Asher B. Hamlin, of Islip, buys land on Eighth Avenue in the spring of 1845 and has eleven matching three-story houses built on the blockfront. Each has a store at street level and living quarters above, under one continuous cornice. By 1969 only three are left, this one among them, and a single restaurant occupies all three ground floors.

    “They were built in 1845 for Asher B. Hamlin, of Islip, Suffolk County, on land he had purchased for development in the spring of the same year.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1885

    February 10

    A bookkeeper living upstairs walks into a police station asking for a bank president

    On the night of February 10, 1885, John E. Roades, a bookkeeper who lives above the shop at No. 50, turns up at the Essex Market prison asking for James D. Fish, president of the Marine Bank. He behaves so oddly that police lock him up, and in the station house he says he is writing a memorandum for the undertaker. The court sends him to the Commissioners of Charities and Correction for examination.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1955

    The Sea Colony, a Mafia-run lesbian bar, occupies the ground floors of the Hamlin row

    By 1955 the Sea Colony fills the ground floors of three 1845 rowhouses on Eighth Avenue, Nos. 48 to 52, and is one of the most popular lesbian bars in the Village into the 1960s. The Mafia runs it and the police raid it often. A button turns on a red light in the back room where women dance, and they scatter to tables and pose as ordinary drinkers.

    Source: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

Further reading

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All 1,156 buildings with stories in West Village