James Roosevelt House

56 Bleecker Street | also 167 Crosby Street, 58 Bleecker Street | NoHo | built 1823

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.

1823
James Roosevelt II moves into a new brick house on Bleecker Street
The three-story, Flemish-bond brick house at what is then 64 Bleecker Street is completed in 1823 as the home of Jacobus 'James' Roosevelt II, a sugar refiner and banker and the great-grandfather of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He moves in with his third wife, Harriet Howland. A renumbering of the street in 1859 changes the address to 56.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1857
Elizabeth Blackwell moves her women's infirmary into the former Roosevelt house
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, described as the first female physician in the United States, acquires the Roosevelt house for the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, a hospital staffed entirely by women. A Ladies' Hospital Fair is held in the building in December 1857, and the infirmary also teaches medicine to women. The trustees buy a building on Second Avenue in 1860, and the hospital moves there the next year.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1874
The U.S. Secret Service opens a New York City office in the building
In 1874 the Secret Service, formed to fight counterfeiting, takes much of the upper floor at 56 Bleecker Street for a New York office. By then the house has a shop on the ground floor and rented rooms above, and the agency shares the upper floors with a private detective firm. The New York Times writes about the new office on April 11.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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