70 Bank Street

West Village | built 1842

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. 1839

    One of four Greek Revival houses at 70 to 76 Bank Street is built for Baldwin & Mills

    Andrew Lockwood, mason Amos Woodruff and carpenters Gabriel Baldwin and John Mills built four Greek Revival houses on Bank Street between 1839 and 1842, on land Lockwood bought in 1835. No. 70 was raised in 1839 for Baldwin & Mills by Woodruff. It later lost its stoop for a basement entrance with a pointed-arch doorway and gained a top story.

    “This house was erected in 1839 for Baldwin & Mills by Amos Woodruff.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1886

    Builder Nathaniel J. Ackerman hires an architect to add a rear extension for a dumbwaiter

    Builder Nathaniel J. Ackerman, a partner of Alexander Steel, took over the house after the grocery merchant Martin Y. Bunn's firm ran into trouble. He had enlarged it to four full floors under a bracketed Italianate cornice, and he and his wife Mary took in boarders, including a woodworker and a clerk. In 1886 he commissioned the architect C. T. Galloway to design a rear extension, nine feet wide, to hold a dumbwaiter.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1933

    September 23

    Press agent Howard Benedict entertains in his studio apartment before heading to Hollywood

    In 1927 theater man and builder Lawrence U. Bertini bought the house to convert it into studio apartments. By 1933 one was home to Howard Benedict, who had been press agent for George Gershwin and Noel Coward and wrote humorous stage material. A Sun columnist noted on September 23, 1933 that the Benedicts were hosting evenings here. Within a few years he became a producer at RKO and Universal.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1984

    January 16

    Real estate broker Jerry Schwartz is found killed in his first-floor apartment

    Jerry Schwartz, 46, a broker with William B. May & Company, lived in the first-floor apartment. When he missed a 6 p.m. dinner with relatives on January 16, 1984, his nephew and cousin went to check on him around 9 p.m., found the door ajar and discovered him dead on the living room floor. Police said the apartment had been ransacked with no sign of a break-in.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 2019

    A Steven Harris Architects restoration brings back the stoop and Greek Revival entrance

    A remodeling before 1940 had removed the stoop and molded lintels and introduced a Gothic pointed-arch door at the basement level. After the house was listed in 2013 for $14.65 million, Steven Harris Architects began a restoration in 2015. Finished in 2019, it is a single-family home again, with the stoop and Greek Revival entrance refabricated and the window lintels restored.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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