9-11 Morton Street
51 7th Avenue South | also 55 7th Avenue South, 9 Morton Street, 51 7th Avenue | West Village | built 1886
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.
- 1886
Henry Tostevin builds a pair of dumbbell tenements on Morton Street for forty families
Read more
Builder Henry M. Tostevin put up the paired tenements at 9-11 Morton Street in 1886, with George Orr and John J. Roberts as co-owners. The plans gave the pair four families per floor, forty families in all. Shortly after completion they were sold to produce merchant George P. Trigg, whose family kept them until the 1920s.
- 1914
Seventh Avenue's extension slices off the back of 9-11 Morton Street and a new facade goes up
When Seventh Avenue South was cut through to Varick Street, the back of each Morton Street tenement was sliced off, and the number of apartments fell from forty to thirty-two. The new Seventh Avenue face, numbered 51-55, got a single Arts and Crafts design with two entrances, one for each of the original tenements. In 1938 the two buildings were joined into one.
“…the rear portion of each was shaved off... reduced to 32 as a result of this alteration, and the buildings received a unified Seventh Avenue South facade…”
- 1930
Seventeen families live at 51-55 Seventh Avenue South, most of them from Italian, Irish and German backgrounds
The 1930 census counted seventeen families in the building. Ten were first-generation Italian immigrant families and three more were second-generation Italian; the other five were second-generation Irish and German. The household heads worked as waiters, pressmen at a printer, truck drivers, longshoremen and a doorman.
Nearby
- 7 Morton Street2 entries
- 13 Morton Street3 entries
- 57 7th Avenue South2 entries
- 5 Morton Street2 entries
- John's of Bleecker Street272 Bleecker Street | 10 entries
- 282 Bleecker Street5 entries