54 Charles Street

West Village | built 1840

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. 1840

    Builders Cornelius and David Doremus complete a Greek Revival row house at 54 Charles Street

    This house went up in 1839-40 as one of five matching brick houses on the south side of the block. Cornelius R. and David R. Doremus built it, and its pair next door, while the mason Solomon Banta, who bought four of the five lots, was the row's chief developer. The three-story houses share a dentiled cornice, though by 1969 this one had lost its pedimented outer doorway.

    “Cornelius R. and David R. Doremus, builders (Nos. 54 and 56)…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1892

    April 8

    Police arrest James Maguire in his mother's rooms here after a woman's death

    In April 1892 Maggie Walling died in a hospital, apparently after a beating, having run off with 17-year-old boarder James Maguire and her husband's savings. Maguire's mother rented rooms at 74 Charles Street, now No. 54, and he was arrested there on April 8. He was jailed while murder charges waited on an exhumation and autopsy.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1923

    September 8

    A police officer who lives here is held after a street fight kills a fellow officer

    Patrolman Archibald Robertson lived at what is now 54 Charles Street. On the night of September 8, 1923, off duty, he confronted another off-duty officer, Jeremiah McCarthy, after his wife said McCarthy had accosted her. Robertson said McCarthy tried to trip him on the way to the station house and he answered with a punch; McCarthy fell and died of a fractured skull. Reading the next morning that McCarthy had died, Robertson turned himself in and was held on $1,000 bail.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1971

    January

    Acts of Art, a pioneering Black-owned gallery, moves to 54 Charles Street

    Patricia Grey and Nigel Jackson opened Acts of Art on Bedford Street in October 1969 as the first Black-owned gallery in downtown Manhattan. In January 1971 it moved to 54 Charles Street. That year the gallery presented the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition's rebuttal to the Whitney Museum's Contemporary Black Artists in America show, and the debut show of Where We At, a collective of Black women artists.

    Source: Village Preservation

  5. 2008

    A renovation turns a long-time rooming house back into a single-family home

    From the early 1850s the house, then numbered 74 Charles Street, took in boarders, mostly working-class tenants, and it was never divided into apartments. A 1936 renumbering of the block gave it the address 54. It kept renting rooms until a renovation completed in 2008 made it a single-family residence again.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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