View down Sullivan Street below Houston Street, south from St. Anthony of Padua Church

This view shows the remarkably intact late 19th/early 20th century streetscape one can experience on streets in the South Village.  The row of tenements create a strikingly monumental uniformity, and everything from the building’s cornices to their storefronts are remarkably intact.  In fact, these blocks of Sullivan and Thompson Street below Houston Street probably have the largest array of virtually completely intact late 19th and early 20th century tenements, including the especially vulnerable architectural detailing at the buildings’ tops and bottoms, anywhere in New York or the world. 

   

Intact tenement entrances and storefronts

Because tenements have long been considered undesirable or charmless structures, efforts to keep them intact are rare.  Here, however, benign neglect has left an incredible concentration of these structures in a condition quite similar to when they were built over a hundred years ago.

Early 19th century rowhouse, Sullivan Street

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