Lafayette Street (Manhattan)

The Public Theatre, formerly the Astor Library

Lafayette Street is a major north-south street in New York City's Lower Manhattan, which runs roughly parallel to Broadway to the west. Originally, the part of the street below Houston Street was called Elm Place.

The street originates at the intersection of Reade Street and Centre Street in Lower Manhattan; this intersection is one block north of City Hall. The one-way street then successively runs through Chinatown, Little Italy, Nolita, and NoHo and finally, between 9th and 10th Streets, merges with Fourth Avenue. A buffered bike lane runs outside of the left traffic lane.

The IRT Lexington Avenue Line runs under Lafayette Street, with stops at Canal Street, Spring Street, Bleecker Street, and Astor Place.

Colonnade Row

Commercial Romanesque: the Schermerhorn Building (Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, 1888) at 3rd Street

The firehouse at 87 Lafayette at White Street (Napoleon LeBrun, arch., 1896) is now the Downtown Community Television Center

History

The street originated as a real estate speculation by John Jacob Astor, who had bought a large market garden in 1804, for $45,000, and leased part of the site to a Frenchman named Delacroix, who erected a popular resort and called it "Vauxhall Gardens" after the famous resort on the edge of London. When the lease expired in 1825, Astor cut a new street through, a three block cul-de-sac beginning at Astor Place, which he named Lafayette Place to commemorate the Revolutionary war hero, who had returned to a rapturous reception in America the previous year. Lots along both sides of the new street sold briskly, earning Astor many times what he had paid for the land two decades before. The grandest was the terrace of matching marble-fronted Greek Revival houses on the west side of the street, called La Grange Terrace when it was built in 1833, but known to New Yorkers as "Colonnade Row" for the two-story order of Corinthian columns that unified its fronts; the nine residences each sold for as much as $30,000; four that remain are the only survivors of the first fashionable residential phase of Lafayette Street, which gained its new name when the city cut through cul-de-sac and extended the street south.

The change in Lafayette Street's history is epitomized by the construction of the Schermerhorn Building in 1888 to replace the Schermerhorn mansion, where Mrs William Colford Schermerhorn had redecorated the interior to resemble Louis XV's Versailles, it was thought, to give a French-themed costume ball in 1854 for six hundred New Yorkers, at which the German Cotillion was introduced in America. A sign of changing times, in 1860 the W.C. Schermerhorns moved uptown to 49 West 23rd Street. Before long, half of Colonnade Row was demolished to make way for a warehouse for Wanamaker's Department Store. Wanamaker's had taken over A.T. Stewart's palatial dry-goods store that occupied the full block between Broadway and Lafayette and 9th and 10th Streets, and had also built an equally gigantic Annex next door between 8th and 9th Streets, with a skywalk connecting the two buildings. The main store burnt down in 1956, but the annex and warehouse buildings remain extant on Lafayette.

Landmarks

Landmarks along Lafayette Street include:

• The New York Mercantile Library building at Astor Place (George E. Harney, arch., 1891), once the site of the Astor Opera House, now condominiums
• Alamo, a cube-shaped sculpture in Astor Place
• Astor Library (1854), founded by John Jacob Astor, now housing The Public Theater
• Colonnade Row (1833), four of a series of nine Greek revival row houses; the Astor Place Theatre is in one
• The Schermerhorn Building, built for the Schermerhorns in 1888 to designs by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, to replace the Schermerhorn mansion.
• The War Resisters League and the NoHo Star on Bleecker Street;
• The Puck Building on East Houston Street
• The New York City Rescue Mission on White Street
• The firehouse at 87 Lafayette at White Street, built in 1895 by Napoleon LeBrun, now the Downtown Community Television Center
• The Ahrens Building, built by George Henry Griebel, and the City Municipal Court Building on the south side of White Street
• Family Court on Franklin Street
• The Department of Health, Hospitals and Sanitation on Leonard Street
• Federal Plaza, which includes the Jacob Javits Federal Building on Worth Street
• Foley Square, named after Tammany Hall's "Big Tom" Foley, on Pearl Street

"Summer streets"

For three Saturdays in August 2008 the New York City Department of Transportation closed Lafayette Street, Park Avenue, and part of East 72nd Street to motor traffic, as a "Summer Streets" program to encourage non-motor uses. This program was renewed in 2009 for the dates of August 8, 15, and 22nd, 2009 from 7:00 AM to 1:00 PM and for 2010 on August 7, 14 and 21.

Gallery

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  The Cube (Alamo by Tony Rosenthal) at Astor Place

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  "Clinton Hall", at Astor Place, was the home of the New York Mercantile Library, and the site of the Astor Opera House where the Astor Place riot of 1849 took place

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  The Astor Place Building at 444 Lafayette

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  Condominium building at 445 Lafayette

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  The Puck Building, former printing plant for Puck magazine, was built in stages and designed by Albert Wagner

See also

Gilded statue of Puck over the front door of the Puck Building

• Lower Manhattan
• Lower East Side
• Merchant's House Museum
• NoHo

References

Notes

External links

• Lafayette Street Storefronts - photographs of buildings and stores along Lafayette Street.
• New York Songlines: Lafayette Street