William Henry Knapp House
65 Bedford Street | West Village | built 1839
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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.
- 1872
A boarder dies of smallpox and his burial figures in a Times exposé of the Small Pox Hospital
Willard Badger, a boarder here in 1870 and 1871, was diagnosed with smallpox and sent off to Blackwell's Island's Small Pox Hospital, where he died in February 1872. That spring his case figured in a New York Times investigation of abuses at the hospital. The undertaker who carried his body to Evergreen Cemetery said he had to pay $5 in fees to island and morgue men before the coffin was released.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1902
Dr. Gertrude N. Light, a resident physician, is appointed a city sanitary inspector
Dr. Gertrude N. Light lived at 65 Bedford Street in the early 1900s and belonged to the Women's University Club. In December 1902 the city appointed her a sanitary inspector, at a time when women in medicine other than nurses were still rare. The job mostly meant going through tenements and reporting on contagious illness and unhealthy conditions. She is listed at this address through at least 1904.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1925
Engineer Guy W. Culgin raises the attic into a glass-walled studio floor and splits the house into apartments
After World War I many old Village houses were altered into artists' studios, and in 1925 the engineer Guy W. Culgin was hired to renovate No. 65. He gave it a full top floor with a wall of glass and divided the house into apartments, two in the basement without kitchens, one on the parlor floor and two on each floor above. An advertisement offered one room with a tiled bath for $50, and the large parlor-floor apartment was listed at $125.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1925
Newlyweds Francis and Isabelle Godolphin move in while he teaches at NYU and studies for a doctorate
Francis Richard Borroum Godolphin, called Frisco, and his bride Isabelle Simmons married on July 25, 1925 and moved into the newly renovated house. Born in Del Rio, Texas, and a Princeton graduate of 1924, he taught Latin and Greek at New York University while studying for his doctorate. In 1927 they moved to New Jersey, where he joined the Princeton staff and became dean and a professor of classics, writing The Greek Historians in 1942.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1960
Billy Lee Brammer, who later publishes The Gay Place, moves into an apartment here
Billy Lee Brammer, born in Dallas in 1929, moved into an apartment at 65 Bedford Street in January 1960. He worked on the staff of Senator Lyndon Johnson, and his novel The Gay Place came out in 1961. Soon after arriving he wrote to his future wife, Nadine Ellen Cannon, that the Village was pleasant and not nearly as wicked and reckless as its reputation made out.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
Further reading
- The William Henry Knapp House - 65 Bedford StreetDaytonian in Manhattan
- Then & Now photos: 65 Bedford StreetVillage Preservation: Greenwich Village Then & Now
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