653 Washington Street

West Village | built 1829

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1829

    Merchant Samuel Norsworthy builds three Federal rowhouses here and likely dies before they are done

    Norsworthy built the three speculative houses in 1829, each three and a half stories of Flemish bond brick with brownstone trim and two dormers. He probably did not live to see them finished, and they passed to his widow, Frances. She first leased No. 653 to Gerardus Riker, a wood inspector who lived there with his mother and a son.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1878

    August

    A French wine dealer opens the Hotel Transatlantique here and dies of a gunshot wound within months

    Francois Gros, whom the New York Times called a well-known French wine dealer, leased the house and opened a small hotel in February 1878, helped by its spot near the Christopher Street pier. Heavy drinking had troubled him before, and it returned a few months later. After a stretch of delirium he went behind his bar, and the bartender saw him take a revolver from the money drawer and carry it upstairs. His wife found him lying on the floor with a gunshot wound to the temple, and he died that afternoon.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1880

    December 7

    A tenant is poisoned when a nearby drugstore sells her oxalic acid instead of laxative salts

    Rosa Hackett, who rented rooms here in 1880, sent her 15-year-old daughter to J. Brophy's pharmacy on Greenwich Street for five cents of Rochelle salts. The clerk had stepped out for breakfast, and the elderly porter in charge handed over a white powder from a large bottle. It was oxalic acid, and Hackett felt her mouth and throat burn after dissolving some in water. A doctor induced vomiting, she recovered, and the porter was held for trial.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1974

    Co-owner Ron Link, an Off Broadway director, produces the popular Women Behind Bars while sharing the house

    Warren S. Creswell, Jr., a steamship company vice president who collected Art Deco, and Ron Link, a director of experimental Off Broadway theater, owned the house together from 1971 to 1977. Link produced the popular Women Behind Bars, a play by Tom Eyen, in 1974. The Blue Star Luncheonette, a neighborhood restaurant, operated at No. 653 from 1948 to 1976.

    “Joint owners (1971-77) of the Federal style house at No. 653 Washington Street were Warren S. Creswell, Jr., vice president of the Luckenbach Steamship Co.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Further reading

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