Augustine Lawrence House
94 Greenwich Street | also 14 Rector Street, 16 Rector Street | Financial District | built 1800
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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.
- 1799
Stock Exchange co-founder Augustine Lawrence builds a gambrel-roofed house at Greenwich and Rector
Augustine Hicks Lawrence, a co-founder of the New York Stock and Exchange Board in 1792, bought the northwest corner of Greenwich and Rector Streets in 1799. He built a three-story house with a gambrel roof, Flemish bond brickwork and marble lintels, among neighbors such as Robert Lenox, DeWitt Clinton and Robert Dickey. The family moved to Robinson Street in 1801.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1803
Jonathan Dayton's firm Lawrence, Dayton & Co. keeps an office at the house
Letters from as early as 1803 suggest that Jonathan Hampton Lawrence and his partner Jonathan Dayton, for whom Dayton, Ohio is named, ran their firm's office from this address. Lawrence moved in during May 1808, though the firm, founded in 1796, ended in 1807. By 1810 the house had been joined inside to its neighbor and given a commercial front.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1837
The house turns into a porterhouse, then a hotel and saloon
From 1810 the combined houses were a boarding house for merchants, but the neighborhood's tone was slipping. Pretextas Delamotte opened a porterhouse at No. 94 in 1837, and by 1841 the directories listed a hotel. It was the Union Hotel under Jean Baptiste Pelissier by 1850, and by the Civil War the ground floor was called a saloon.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1885
Police Captain Thomas Cherry dies in the Greenwich Street house where his brother kept a saloon
Thomas Cherry, who joined the police in 1857 and became a captain in 1871, lived here with his large family while his brother James ran the liquor business. He had seven minor children when he died of consumption on March 8, 1885, and the Sun said he left little behind. Eight police companies escorted his funeral procession up Broadway after services at St. Peter's Church.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1920
The Lawrence heirs auction the house after 120 years in the family
Augustine Lawrence died in 1828, and his descendants held the property until the McCrea family put it up for auction on December 21, 1920. The Times called it a four-story tenement with stores, and it sold for $52,000 to Daniel W. McCrea, a descendant. He sold it a year later, ending more than 120 years of family ownership.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
Further reading
- The 1799 Augustine Lawrence House -- No. 94 Greenwich StDaytonian in Manhattan
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