FRAME HOUSE
Bedford and Grove Streets
MAY 12, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 117

The house at 17 Grove Street was built in 1822, the year that an outbreak of yellow fever led many New Yorkers to seek the safety of rural Greenwich Village. Built by a windowsash maker, the house is the largest and most intact of the Village's remaining wood-frame structures, which were outlawed for fire prevention in 1866. Originally of two stories, the house gained a third floor in 1870. The sash maker's workshop, visible behind the house on Bedford Street, became a single-family residence. The mock half-timbered "castle" at 102 Bedford Street was the result of a 1925 renovation by amateur architect Clifford Reed Daily of an 1835 row house. Supported by opera impresario and art patron Otto Kahn, Daily embodied the stereotype of the Greenwich Village "eccentric" and set out to create a home appropriate to "the minds of creative Villagers."

In 1987, 17 Grove Street and the workshop were purchased for $1.1 million and have been meticulously restored, a quintessential example of contemporary gentrification.

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