William W. Tompkins House

68 5th Avenue | Greenwich Village | built 1900

Open on the map6 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. 1840

    John H. Cornell builds a 25-foot-wide Greek Revival house at 68 Fifth Avenue

    As wealthy New Yorkers moved up from the Bond Street district, Cornell put up this residence just south of 13th Street around 1840. It had a columned portico on a brownstone stoop and floor-to-ceiling parlor windows opening onto a full-width cast-iron balcony. Before it was finished, he sold it to the flour merchant Nathaniel H. Wolfe.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1857

    August 11

    The flour firm of an early owner of 68 Fifth Avenue fails and helps set off the Panic of 1857

    Nathaniel H. Wolfe, who owned 68 Fifth Avenue in the 1840s and early 1850s, founded N. H. Wolfe & Co., among the largest flour and grain firms in the country. It failed on August 11, 1857, after overseas purchases of American crops fell. Less than two weeks later, the New York office of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company stopped making payments, which triggered a run on the banks; Village Preservation describes the episode as arguably the first global economic crisis.

    Source: Village Preservation

  3. 1872

    September

    Irish-born millionaire Andrew Carrigan dies at his home, 68 Fifth Avenue

    Carrigan came to New York around 1821 as a boy, grew rich in provisions and then real estate, and bought 68 Fifth Avenue around 1868. He led the Irish Emigrant Society and served as a state commissioner of emigration. His funeral was held in the house, with Alexander T. Stewart and William F. Havemeyer among the honorary pallbearers, and he was later interred in the family vault at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1934

    February 22

    Mary Kingsland Tompkins, daughter of a New York mayor, dies at 68 Fifth Avenue

    Mary was the daughter of Mayor Ambrose C. Kingsland and the widow of William W. Tompkins, whose grandfather was Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins. The couple bought the house in 1882 and stayed on as commerce crowded the avenue, with Mary rarely entertaining after their only son died. She left the house to St. Luke's Hospital, which sold it in 1937.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1943

    Servicemen from many nations sing around a piano at the Music Box Canteen, and artist Yun Gee raises money for it

    During the war the house held the Music Box Canteen, a service center where Allied sailors and airmen, among them Australian flyers and French sailors, could relax, sing and drink coffee. In 1943 the Chinese-American modernist Yun Gee staged an exhibition to benefit it. The canteen's administrator was Minna Regina Falk, who later became the first woman to hold a full professorship in history at NYU.

    Source: Village Preservation

  6. 1984

    December

    The New School announces a twelve-story replacement for 68 Fifth Avenue that is never built

    After Parsons and then The New School took over the building in the early 1980s, a school vice president told The Villager in December 1984 of a plan to tear it down and raise a twelve-story building. The scheme was dropped, as an earlier 1937 plan to demolish the house had been. A 1994 renovation instead turned the building into school offices.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

Nearby

All 518 buildings with stories in Greenwich Village