Sniffen Court
A small, gated nineteenth century enclave in the heart of mallishly twenty-first-century Murray Hill, Sniffen Court is perhaps most famous as the setting of the album cover for The Doors' Strange Days. One of only a handful of preserved antebellum streets and narrows in Manhattan proper, Sniffen Court was built between 1850 and 1860 as a staging ground for the newly prosperous neighborhood, and the private, loftlike residences that now line the alleyway were built as carriage houses. (They were converted around the turn of the century). Though there have been several investigations, amateur and professional, launched to determine the origin of the peculiar, almost fabulistic name, the best hypothesis is that the court was not named for any of the landowners, who thought of the small court as a kind of glorified closet, but the architect who designed them.
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