P R O P O S E D   H I S T O R I C   D I S T R I C T

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NO. 129 EAST 17TH STREET
Architect: Napoleon Le Brun
1878 - 1879

By the 1870s, the Gramercy Park neighborhood was almost entirely built up with rowhouses; construction, however, did not cease in the area. Instead of single-family homes, apartment houses began to appear, either on vacant sites or in place of early homes that were demolished. Among these were some of the earliest middle-class apartment houses erected in New York City. In fact, this five-story building is thought to be the city's oldest intact apartment house. Although Richard Morris Hunt's now-demolished Stuyvesant Apartments, the first middle-class apartment house in the city, had opened on East 18th Street in 1870, only a few similar buildings were erected in the following years. This was partly due to the fact that apartment-house living was not immediately accepted by the middle class and partly to the real-estate depression caused by the Panic of 1873. The East 17th Street building was one of the first apartment houses erected when construction resumed in the late 1870s as the effects of the panic subsided. The building was planned to house five families behind a stylish Gothic Revival brick and brownstone facade.