John Radway House

55 Jane Street | West Village | built 1846

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. 1846

    George Schott builds two identical houses; No. 55 is first numbered 76

    Tobacconist George Schott put up two identical three-story houses, 20 feet wide, just east of Hudson Street in 1846, with red brick over high brownstone basements and dentiled cornices. This eastern house was first No. 76 Jane Street and was renumbered 55 in 1855. Its first resident, the printer William Applegate, died of a stroke on November 26, 1847, not long after moving in.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1853

    October 16

    A newspaper testimonial for Radway's Ready Relief comes from John Radway's own house

    John Radway bought the house from Applegate's widow. With his brother Richard he ran Radway & Co., manufacturing chemists at 162 Fulton Street, which by 1852 sold Radway's Ready Relief under the brand R.R.R. On October 16, 1853 the Sunday Dispatch ran an item about a builder whose rheumatism vanished within minutes of the remedy, sent for from his son-in-law's house at 76 Jane Street, without saying the son-in-law was Radway.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1860

    Landscape painter George Loring Brown boards with an engineer's family

    In 1860 and 1861 the landscape painter George Loring Brown, born in Boston in 1814 and a student of Washington Allston, boarded with the family of engineer William K. Thomas here. His stay was short because he spent almost all of his time in Europe.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1940

    William S. Burroughs takes a room in Jack Anderson's rooming house

    In 1940 Jack Anderson, an 18-year-old office boy, was living in the rooming house at 55 Jane Street and had begun a sporadic sexual affair with the writer William S. Burroughs. According to biographer Barry Miles, Burroughs took a room in the same house the day after the two were found in bed at the Taft Hotel. Anderson's other partners so distressed Burroughs that he severed the tip of a little finger with poultry shears, an episode that fed his short story "The Finger."

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1971

    The house serves as Shaft's apartment in the 1971 film Shaft

    The 1971 film Shaft used the house as the apartment of its title character. Earlier, in 1949, the building had been converted to a two-family residence, and a renovation completed in 2012 returned it to a single-family home.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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