509 Hudson Street

also 256 West 10th Street, 511 Hudson Street | West Village | built 1828

Open on the map5 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. 1828

    Nos. 509 and 511 Hudson are the last survivors of a blockfront Richard Amos built in 1828

    The Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1969 Greenwich Village report calls the two small brick houses the surviving remnant of a row of houses put up in 1828 for Richard Amos, an important early property owner in the Village. At the time of designation, a gasoline station of 1947 occupied the corner lot at Nos. 513-515, next door to them.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1890

    Tammany Hall's Ninth District makes 509 Hudson its headquarters and holds a Congressional convention there

    By 1890 the house that had been a teacher's home in the 1870s was the base of Tammany Hall's Ninth District organization. The district's Congressional convention met there that year. The group kept the house for two more years before moving to 13 Abingdon Square in May 1892.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1892

    "Mother" Burdick opens a reading room and parlor for sailors at 509 Hudson

    When Tammany left, Mrs. Burdick, wife of a Seventh-Day Baptist minister, leased the house for sailors she had been meeting on the Hudson River docks with another seamen's missionary. A sign over the door announced the New Mizpah Reading Room for Seamen, with reading tables in the front parlor and a piano and organ in the back. She also sent "reading bags" out with departing ships, held Tuesday concerts, and in March 1893 organized a candy pull.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1893

    August 3

    The Greenwich Wheelmen cycling club throws a housewarming stag at 509 Hudson for more than 300 guests

    Within months of Mrs. Burdick's sailors' haven closing, the Greenwich Wheelmen moved in from Charles Street, adding twenty members in three weeks to reach seventy. Their housewarming evening included banjo and cornet playing, comic readings, violin solos and songs, with over 300 friends and neighbors attending. The Times described the house as fitted with a double parlor, a room for storing bicycles, a training room and a card room.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1978

    A cooperative-housing project guts Nos. 509 and 511 Hudson and joins them to the loft next door

    After serving as an undertaker's rooms from about 1908 and being cut open for shop windows in the 1930s, the two Federal houses were slated for conversion in late 1978. The Recycling for Housing Partnership gutted them and combined them with the loft building at Nos. 505-507, producing 30 cooperative apartments reached through a courtyard on West 10th Street. The facades were nominally restored, with the shop fronts bricked in and new windows installed.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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