Houses at 208–218 East 78th Street | |
 North elevation, 2008. 208–218 East 78th Street are numbered from right to left. | |
  Location within New York City Show map of New York City Houses at 208–218 East 78th Street (New York) Show map of New York Houses at 208–218 East 78th Street (the United States) Show map of the United States | |
| Location | New York,NY |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 40°46′23″N73°57′26″W / 40.77306°N 73.95722°W /40.77306; -73.95722 |
| Built | 1861–65[1] |
| Architectural style | Italianate |
| NRHP reference No. | 83001732 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | 1983 |
| Designated NYCL | May 9, 1978 |
Thehouses at 208–218 East 78th Street inManhattan, New York, United States, are a group of six attached brickrowhouses built during the early 1860s, on the south side of the street betweenSecond andThird Avenues. They are the remnant of 15 built along that street asaffordable housing when theUpper East Side was just beginning to be developed.
They are distinctive for the round-arched windows and door openings on their north (front)facades, an unusual trim for houses otherwise firmly in theItalianatearchitectural style common for urban buildings of that era.[2] They are the second oldest group of buildings on the Upper East Side after theEast 78th Street Houses a block to the east, but unlike that row they retain more of their original appearance. In 1978 they were designatedNew York City landmarks,[2] and in 1983 they were listed on theNational Register of Historic Places.
The row is on the south side of East 78th, betweenSecond andThird avenues. Theblock is residential, with many similar, taller rowhouses on both sides of the tree-lined street. The neighborhood is just outside theUpper East Side Historic District, close to the southern edge ofYorkville.
Each house is three stories high and twobays, only 13 feet 4 inches (4.06 m) wide on a raised basement. All are trimmed with carved stone elliptical arched surrounds. The entryways and the adjacent first-story windows have an additional keystone molding. The upper windows also havecorbeled sills. The flat rooflines have projectingcornices with verticalbrackets.Stoops with iron railings lead to the sidewalk from the entryways, all located on the east bay of the front facades.[1]
There are a few deviations from these standards. The house at 214 has hadshutters added, and it and 216 have had some of their originalironwork replaced. At 218, the originalbrownstone stoop has been replaced with a modernconcrete one.[1]
The construction of theThird Avenue Railway in 1852 allowed residents of what was then thevillage of Yorkville to commute to jobs in what is todayMidtown andLower Manhattan. The present area of East 78th Street was still an undeveloped section of Yorkville nine years later, in 1861, when Howard Martin bought 200 feet (61 m) offrontage along the block to build speculative housing.[1]
In accordance with aNew York Supreme Court decision a year earlier, Martin paid $128 ($3,499 in 2024[3]) to the city for the opening of 78th Street. He hadsubdivided it into 15lots, numbered 206–234 East 78th, and had begun building when he sold the properties to William Brower in 1862. Brower retained the builders, Warren and Ransom Beman and John Buckley, a likely reason for the uniformity of the resulting buildings.[1]
Construction was delayed somewhat by the difficulty of getting materials during theCivil War, but Brower had sold all the houses by the time construction was finished in 1865. Since then, number 206 on the west end of the row and 220–234 on the east have been demolished to build the neighboring, taller apartment buildings.[1]
Other than the alterations noted above, they are as they were when originally built. All five have remained private residences. In 2010 a real estate listing for 208 East 78th gave its rent as $15,775 a month.[4]
Notes
Media related to208-218 East 78th Street at Wikimedia Commons
