RHINELANDER ROW I
MARCH 20, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 84

RHINELANDER ROW II
OCTOBER 29, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 179

RHINELANDER ROW III
Seventh Avenue between West 12th and 13th Streets
MAY 5, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 236

Rhinelander Row consisted of 11 houses with wooden balconies and front yards. It was constructed in 1843 by William C. Rhinelander--12 years before Rhinelander Gardens on West 11th Street --and remained in the hands of the Rhinelander Real Estate Company until the 1930s. Built along an avenue instead of a quiet side street, the Row did not fare as well as the Gardens. For three-quarters of a century, Rhinelander Row stood at the base of Seventh Avenue, but with the 1914 southern extension of the avenue to Canal Street, the Row lost its neighboring residences and stood stranded on the edge of a major commercial intersection. A 1927 plan for an apartment building on the site was scuttled with the onset of the depression, and when demolition was announced in 1936, only one house on the Row was occupied.

Abbott first photographed Rhinelander Row in March 1936 (Abbott File 84), well before the May 10 New York Times's front page story, "Historic Greenwich Village Homes to be Demolished." Although she may not have been aware of the Row's fate in March, she returned two more times to record the stages of its demise. Shortly before election day, Abbott showed Rhinelander Row, abandoned and decorated with campaign posters for John A. Byrnes, a Democratic candidate for City Court judge, who subsequently won a ten-year term (Abbott File 179). The following May, while a WPA crew carefully dismembered its porches, Abbott photographed the site again (Abbott File 236). Workmen, visible on the roof on the second-floor porch, were probably responsible for collecting clothing left in the houses and draping it on a front yard tree, which Abbott placed in the center of her composition.

When the federal government demolished the Row in 1937, no ambitious plans for the future of the block had been made. For many years, it was occupied by a diner and a gas station. In 1964, the National Maritime Union erected a fortresslike national headquarters, which have since been taken over by the adjacent St. Vincent's Hospital.

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