17 Grove Street

17 Grove Street

The largest and most well-preserved of the Village’s last remaining wood-frame houses. (The building practice was banned in 1866 to prevent the kind of devastating urban brushfires that had routinely crippled even the most modern of the pre-modern cities, perhaps more importantly pre-professional-Fire-Department). The house was built by a well-to-do sash-maker in 1822, when an outbreak of yellow fever in southern Manhattan led many prosperous New Yorkers to seek refuge in Greenwich Village, then relatively pristine and uninhabited. As originally constructed, the house was a simple, squat two-story affair, but a workshop (later a single-family residence) was added in the back in 1833 and a third story attached in 1870—several years past the house’s glory years as a Civil War-era brothel.