Little Cary Building
620 Broadway | also 154 Crosby Street | NoHo | built 1859
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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.
- 1858
Exhibitors from the burned Crystal Palace reopen their fair in the new building at 620 Broadway
After the Crystal Palace burned and collapsed in about twenty minutes on October 5, 1858, its exhibitors went looking for a new venue and found the just-finished building at 620 Broadway. The Fair of the American Union opened there in December, and The New York Times likened the new association to a phoenix risen from the palace's ruins. Clocks, electric machines and printing stamps were on view on the first floor, a band played on the second amid sewing machines and enameled furniture, and the fourth floor held plaster casts and marble sculpture.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1858
Henry Dolan puts up the NoHo district's earliest surviving cast-iron-faced loft building at 620 Broadway
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Henry Dolan, a wealthy landowner and philanthropist, put up the building at 620 Broadway in 1858. John B. Snook designed the six-story Renaissance Revival store and loft building, and the D.D. Badger Company made its iron front, detailed to suggest stone as cast-iron fronts of the period typically were. The NoHo designation report counts it as the earliest surviving commercial building in the district with a cast-iron front, and among the oldest in the city.
- 1858
Henry Dolan builds on land leased from the widow of druggist David Prall, whose residence stood here
An earlier building stood on this lot: the residence of David Prall, a wealthy druggist. When Henry Dolan, a millionaire landowner and philanthropist who died in 1901, built 620 Broadway in 1858-59, he did it on land leased from Prall's widow, Margaret Prall. Dolan's heirs kept the building into the mid-twentieth century.
“He built 620 Broadway on land leased from Margaret Prall, the widow of the wealthy druggist David Prall, whose residence had stood here.”
- 1887
A clothier's new salesman, just out of prison, steals stock at 620 Broadway and blames his landlady
In 1887 the clothiers Newborg, Rosenberg & Co. hired Michael Nathanson as a salesman, not long after he had finished a ten-year sentence for highway robbery. Before long he took about $100 worth of clothing from the store. Pleading guilty, he told the judge his landlady had offered to forgive a $20 debt if he stole a coat and waistcoat for her husband, then threatened to tell his employers unless he kept bringing clothes. She denied it and went free; Nathanson went back to jail, and The New York Times called his story diaphanous.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1897
Fire destroys the umbrella makers' floors at 620 Broadway while early automatic alarms fail
Just before daybreak on February 7, 1897, fire broke out on the top floor of 620 Broadway, where Schloss Brothers, umbrella manufacturers, held the upper two floors. The building's early automatic fire alarms stayed silent until the blaze had broken through the roof, and both Schloss floors were destroyed in a fire that took two hours to put out. Losses came to about $5,000 for the firm, $6,000 in water damage below and $5,000 to the building, but the supposedly fireproof cast-iron facade stood.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1911
Toy maker Selchow & Richter Co. takes space at 620 Broadway and stays for more than a decade
Selchow & Richter Co., a toy company, began operating from 620 Broadway in 1911 and stayed for over ten years. For Christmas 1922 it advertised Parcheesi for $1, an electric Illuminator Artist and, for fifty cents, a novelty called Miraclum, billed as bewildering and perplexing.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
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