54 East 4th Street
East Village | built 1878
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.
- 1878
Herman Bruns has Frederick Klemt design a five-story tenement, and puts his initials on the cornice
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In 1878 the developer Herman Bruns commissioned Frederick W. Klemt to design this five-story Neo-Grec tenement, with commercial spaces at the base framed by cast-iron piers. The window lintels are molded and pedimented, and the cornice carries Bruns's initials, H.B. The stoop was later removed and the main entrance moved down to the basement.
- 1971
Performance artist and activist Agosto Machado starts a quarter-century in an apartment here
Around 1970 or 1971 Agosto Machado, who took part in the Stonewall uprising and called himself a street queen, moved into an apartment in this tenement and stayed until 1996 or 1997. In 1971 he made his stage debut in Jackie Curtis's Vain Victory, and he grew close to Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa. In the 1980s he performed at Club 57 and the Pyramid during the East Village drag renaissance.
Source: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
- 1996
Agosto Machado leaves the apartment where he made shrines to friends lost to AIDS
Many of Machado's friends died in the AIDS epidemic, and he went to about one memorial a week and cared for sick friends. In his apartment here he gathered programs, clippings, photographs and matchbooks that had belonged to the dead and arranged them into private shrines and altars. He left in 1996 or 1997 but stayed in the neighborhood, and his shrine work was later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.
Source: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
Further reading
- 54 East 4th StreetVillage Preservation: East Village Building Blocks
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