Henry Luhrs House

7 Gay Street | also 141 Waverly Place | West Village | built 1900

Open on the map5 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. 1826

    John Pollock builds a brick house at the corner of Art Street and Gay Street

    As Greenwich Village boomed in 1826, John Pollock put up a two-and-a-half-story brick house at this corner. Art Street was later renamed Waverley Place for Sir Walter Scott's novel. By 1841 the grocer Isaac A. Lawrence lived here, and a grocer named Henry Breckell, who ran his store from the address, probably gave it a cast-iron shopfront before 1854.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1860

    The corner house is raised to four stories and a tenement is added on Gay Street

    In 1860 the original house at the corner was raised to four stories, and a rear portion that became No. 7 Gay Street was added at the same time. The grocery on the ground floor already had cast-iron columns with Corinthian capitals by 1854. On the Gay Street side, a cast-iron fire escape in Italianate style links the upper windows, and the city's landmark commission thought it may have started as a set of balconies.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1888

    September 19

    Grocer Henry Luhrs and his son are arrested after a drunk patrolman clubs the son outside the house

    Returning home on the night of September 19, 1888, John Luhrs and his brother-in-law John Rosenbaum were challenged by Patrolman Richard Barry, a month into the job, whom the Evening World called half drunk. Barry clubbed John, and his father Henry Luhrs rushed down from the windows above and joined the scuffle. Both Luhrses were arrested for disorderly conduct, but a magistrate discharged Henry, and a pile of complaints against Barry followed.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1906

    July 2

    A drunken son pushes his blind father out of a third-floor window of the Gay Street tenement

    On July 2, 1906, thirty-year-old John Dunn came home drunk to the flat he shared with his father Peter, a blind man past seventy. After an argument, he grabbed the old man and pushed him out of a third-floor window. Peter was left dangling by his hands until a policeman forced the door open, and John was sentenced the next afternoon to six months on Blackwell's Island.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1948

    Louis C. Luhrs dies in the bedroom where he was born eighty-seven years earlier

    Louis C. Luhrs, a son of grocer Henry Luhrs, ran his real estate business from the house by 1882 and stayed on after retiring in 1933. In the Depression he sold the upstate farm that once belonged to the stage actor Joseph Jefferson. He died in 1948 in the room where he was born in 1861. The building and Nos. 5 and 7 Gay Street sold in October 1955, and the new owners planned remodeling.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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