94 University Place

also 32 East 12th Street | Greenwich 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. 1855

    Dr. Oliver Wellington moves into the new corner house and opens a water cure in the basement

    Dr. Oliver Hastings Wellington moved into the newly finished Italianate house at East 12th Street and University Place in 1855, with his wife, Charlotte, and their five children. He turned part of the basement into a Water Cure Establishment, offering cold-water baths in a treatment then in vogue. That December he also advertised rooms for boarders, noting that Fifth Avenue stages passed the door.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1857

    Wellington, who once treated the daughter of the accused, testifies in the Burdell murder inquiry

    In spring 1855 Emma Augusta Cunningham had brought her daughter to Wellington's basement water cure. Two years later she stood accused of murdering her employer, Dr. Harvey Burdell, one of the most publicized killings in the city's history, and Wellington was called as a witness. The New York Herald of February 6, 1857 printed his prickly exchange with the coroner, in which he declined to swear an oath and affirmed instead.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1874

    Jacob Story Jr. moves his fish and oyster market into the basement

    Jacob S. Story, a fish dealer who ran a market at 56 University Place, bought the house after Wellington's family left for Massachusetts in 1858. His son, Jacob Jr., kept the business going until 1874, then converted this basement into a shop and moved the oyster and fish market in. The family relocated to 73 Seventh Avenue, selling its furnishings at auction on October 16, and the dressmaker Maria Crosset rented the house.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1905

    The corner saloon's owner is arrested for opening on Sunday and running a disorderly house

    By the 1890s the old fish store was Isaac Boehm's saloon, with a rooming house above, and in 1901 Sabath & Brown took it over, bound to sell one brewery's beer. The Daily Argus reported on July 21, 1905 that Seymour Sabath had been arrested for keeping the bar open on Sunday and for conducting a disorderly house, the period's polite phrase for a brothel. The saloon was gone the next year.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1949

    June 22

    Madden Studios opens in the former house with classes in primitive dance and percussion

    Composer and dancer Charles Madden opened Madden Studios in the old residence on June 22, 1949. According to the New York Age, Primitive Dance classes would be taught by James Hunt, a former member of the Dunham Experimental Group, and by Lavinia Williams, an alumna of Katherine Dunham's company, while Madden himself would teach Primitive Percussion.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Further reading

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