The stories behind the buildings, statues and other points of interest that make Manhattan fascinating. Post a Comment. By the mids the foot-wide house at 70 Greene Street was home to sash-maker Elijah Yerks. It was replaced by a more modern home in by Catherine M.
Jones, who used it as an investment property. Her choice of locations was, perhaps, surprising. By now Greene street was in decline and increasingly filling with bordellos.
Greene Street had conceivably become the most notorious red light district in Manhattan. And so, not surprisingly, 70 Greene Street became one of the district's "bagnios. Houses of ill-fame appear to have been selected and made to serve as places of abode for a score or more of applicants of "good moral character" upon whom citizenship purports to have been conferred.
To illustrate: No. It may have been the bad press, or simply the commercialization of the area that prompted Catherine M. Jones to step in. Coster to alter the building "from tenement to a store. Instead of a cast iron storefront, as was becoming increasingly popular in the Soho district, Coster used stone.
His neo-Grec design included wide bandcourses that connected the openings of the upper stories. The lintels grew less decorative with each succeeding floor--from incised scrolled carvings at the second to nothing at the fourth.
