Jane Jacobs House
555 Hudson Street | West Village | built 1842
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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.
- 1842
Mason John Cole buys the land for a row of three houses at 555-559 Hudson Street
The 1969 landmarks report describes Nos. 555 to 559 Hudson as a row of three houses, with No. 559 dated to 1842, put up on land that John Cole, a mason living at 52 Charles Street, had bought to develop. Because Cole also paid the taxes on them, the report concludes he built them. The row was later heavily altered, with a stone-look veneer added to No. 559 in 1955 and a new brick front on No. 557 in 1951.
- 1947
Jane Jacobs moves into 555 Hudson and begins renovating a house in a shabby neighborhood
The author and activist Jane Jacobs lived at 555 Hudson from 1947 to 1968. In the late 1940s she began renovating the house while she and her husband raised their children in what was then a rundown area. Over twenty-one years, daily life on this stretch of Hudson Street gave her the observations that later fed her thinking about how cities work.
Source: Internet Archive
- 1961
Jane Jacobs's Hudson Street block becomes the reference point for The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Her 1961 book returns again and again to the block outside 555 Hudson, most memorably in the sidewalk ballet and the eyes on the street, in chapters on safety, contact and children. Place Matters notes that historian Peter Laurence has questioned whether she wrote the book at this address, placing her writing studio around the corner. The house still mattered, it argues, because it tied her to Greenwich Village.
Source: Internet Archive
- 1968
The Jacobs family leaves 555 Hudson for Toronto to keep their sons out of the Vietnam War draft
In 1968 the Jacobs family left Hudson Street and moved to Toronto, hoping to shield their sons from being drafted for Vietnam. Jane Jacobs had spent the late 1960s co-leading opposition to a West Village redevelopment plan that would have run an expressway through the neighborhood. Place Matters suggests her advocacy may have spared the Village from being wiped out physically.
Source: Internet Archive
- 2020
Village Preservation dedicates a plaque to Jane Jacobs at her former home, 555 Hudson Street
On October 29, 2020, Village Preservation held a virtual plaque unveiling for the house, joined by its executive director Andrew Berman, scholars Roberta Gratz and Mindy Thompson Fullilove, and Susan Spehar, then the owner of 555 Hudson. The actor Marisa Tomei, who voiced Jacobs's writings in the documentary Citizen Jane, also took part. Its co-hosts included Jane's Walk, the Historic Districts Council and the Center for the Living City.
Source: Village Preservation
Further reading
- Then & Now photos: 555 Hudson StreetVillage Preservation: Greenwich Village Then & Now
- 555 Hudson StreetPlace Matters
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