Abrahams Magazine Service Building

56 East 13th Street | Greenwich Village | built 2006

Open on the map5 entries

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1898

    April 9

    A 25-foot Italianate brownstone, once home to a Civil War veteran, is marked for replacement

    In spring 1898 the narrow Italianate brownstone at 56 East 13th Street, where Civil War veteran Jeremiah T. Hallett had once lived, was doomed. The Real Estate Record & Guide noted on April 9 that Otto C. Von Schoen, an architect, was drawing up an eight-story fireproof loft and store for Frederick A. Boeckeler, budgeted at $130,000. The brownstone was an earlier building on the site.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1898

    Otto Von Schoen gives the new loft building a Beaux Arts front with stone lions on its balcony

    Von Schoen designed the 1898 building to impress. Granite pilasters with Ionic capitals flanked the storefront, and a full-width balcony on stout brackets crowned the two-story second section, its balustrade holding seated lions with shields. Above, a grid of openings rose to splayed lintels and keystones at the seventh floor. Brackets with wreaths and swags once carried the cornice, which has since been lost.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1901

    May 19

    A fire in a cloak maker's space stays inside it, proving the building's fireproof claims

    The new building filled with apparel manufacturers, among them A. Famberg & Co., makers of cloaks. On May 19, 1901, fire broke out in the Famberg rooms and caused damage that the 2022 source puts at about $31,400 in today's money. It did not spread past those premises, which bore out the fireproof construction that Von Schoen's 1898 plans had promised.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1954

    Abrahams Magazine Service and AMS Press take over the building after decades of garment tenants

    Apparel firms stayed through the Depression, but in 1954 two firms, the A. M. S. Reprint Company (also called AMS Press) and Abrahams Magazine Service, moved in. The press republished out-of-print books; in October 1964 The New York Times reported that Columbia University Press had sold it the rights to the English Institute Annuals and Essays, 13 hardcover volumes due the next year. The magazine service meanwhile kept hundreds of thousands of periodicals, some from the 19th century.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 2001

    March

    Over 300,000 old magazines go to the curb as the magazine service moves, and scavengers dig in

    Faced with a big rent increase in 2000, owner Gabriel Hornstein moved the business to Brooklyn and cleared out its stock first. The New York Times reported on March 25, 2001 that more than 300,000 publications, many from the 1800s, would be thrown out over about two weeks, left nightly on postal carts at the curb. Used-book dealers and other treasure hunters arrived with vans to dig through them, while Hornstein insisted that nothing rare was being discarded.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 518 buildings with stories in Greenwich Village