51 Horatio Street

also 51A Horatio Street | West Village | built 1848

Open on the map5 entries

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

1. 1848

   Attorney Farley Gray builds a row of five narrow Greek Revival houses, including No. 51

   No. 51 belongs to a row put up in 1847-48 for Farley Gray, a lawyer who lived on Clinton Place (now West 8th Street). His wife, Magdalena, had bought the land from Jane Gahn in 1847. Each house is only two windows wide, and the paired doorways and the unbroken band course over the parlor windows tie Nos. 45 through 51 together visually. Later the row grew to four stories.

   “This row was erected for Farley Gray, an attorney at 14 Pine Street, whose home was at the then fashionable Clinton Place (No. 14).”

   Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

2. 1928

   May

   Painter and theater doorman Archibald Bonge keeps his studio in the rear building at 51 Horatio

   In the 1920s the artist Archibald Bonge, who had studied at the University of Nebraska, rented the small building behind No. 51 as a studio. By day he painted; by evening he worked as a doorman at the Paramount Theatre in Times Square. When the New York Evening Post interviewed him in May 1928, he was preparing a one-man show in the Fifth Avenue Playhouse lobby and said he would marry the actress Eunice Lyle, who turned out to be a Mississippi banker's daughter.

   Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

3. 1934

   Children's author Iris Vinton is living at 51 Horatio Street with her husband by 1934

   By 1934 the writer Iris Vinton, born in Mississippi in 1905, was living here with her husband, Louis German. She started out writing short plays and became known for children's novels, including Flying Ebony (1957), which was filmed as The Mooncussers, and Longbow Island and The Black Horse Company. Her credits also include work on several Nancy Drew mysteries.

   Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

4. 1973

   Summer

   Todd Rundgren and Bebe Buell lease a rock-and-roll triplex at 51 Horatio Street

   After a 1972 renovation split the house into a basement-and-parlor duplex and an upper triplex, musician and producer Todd Rundgren and model and singer Bebe Buell rented the triplex in summer 1973 for $600 a month. In her 2001 memoir Buell recalls a spiral staircase linking three levels, a living room with a fireplace and a piano on the mezzanine. She likens the parties there to the movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and the couple had left by 1975.

   Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

5. 1979

   December 26

   Controller Robert Hope Fuller is found shot dead in his triplex at 51 Horatio Street

   Robert Hope Fuller, a 43-year-old bachelor and controller at a corporation, bought the house in 1977 for $200,000 and lived in the triplex. After he cooked Christmas dinner for three former neighbors on December 25, 1979, a worried friend entered the unlocked house the next evening and found the rooms ransacked and Fuller dead of a bullet wound to the neck. Newsday reported that detectives suspected a robbery, though another theory was also being weighed.

   Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

• The 1848 Abraham B. Skillman House - 51 Horatio Street Daytonian in Manhattan
• Then & Now photos: 51 Horatio StreetVillage Preservation: Greenwich Village Then & Now

Nearby

• 57 Horatio Street5 entries
• 59 Horatio Street5 entries
• 58 Horatio Street3 entries
• 60 Horatio Street5 entries
• 641 Hudson Street1 entry
• 38 Gansevoort Street1 entry

All 1,156 buildings with stories in West Village