The cast iron facade at
26 Wooster Street,
the future home of
The Leslie/Lohman
Gay Art
Foundation and Gallery

Five steps up...

Twenty-Six Wooster Street

By Charles W. Leslie

After 1524, when the Italian explorer Verrazano became the first European to nose his ship into New York Bay and what was to become known as the Hudson River, no other Europeans appeared until 1610 when Dutch merchantmen began trading for furs with the coastal Indians. In 1614 a Dutch captain—Adrian Block (Block Island)—lost his ship and set up shop on upper New York Bay, where he and his crew built a replacement, the "Ontrust." At the same time Dutch traders and sailors started building a few cabin-like huts at the south tip of Manhattan Island, establishing a kind of trading village where they could winter over.

By 1623 The Dutch West India Company had assumed direct control of the settlement and soon expanded it into the province of New Netherland—a huge territory which ran from the Canadian border to the Delaware River.

In 1626 Peter Minuit, the company’s Provisional Director General, officially “bought” Manhattan from the Indians for 60 guilders worth of “goods.” (The famous $24). Thereupon the company immediately began the construction of Fort Amsterdam at what is now Battery Park and the town became officially known as Niew Amsterdam.

It is recorded that by 1643 no fewer than 18 different languages were spoken in the booming little port city, and in 1644 something truly remarkable, for the age, occurred. In August of that year the Dutch West India Company freed all slaves who had been in service for 20 years, giving them agricultural land to the north of the city. It is therefore that the SoHo cast iron district is the site of the first free black settlement in America and retained a significant black population for over 200 years until the mid-nineteenth century when many old residential buildings gave way to commercial development.

In 1653 Niew Amsterdam was made an “incorporated” city—that is, far more self-governing, although the West India Company still called all the shots concerning trade. But it was not to last.

In 1664, only 54 years after the first Dutch arrivals, a large war fleet appeared in the harbor, sent by the Duke of York. Unable to defend itself the city, and eventually the province, surrendered. The English victory was relatively pacific, and the considerable Dutch population was simply enfolded into the new English hegemony. This was to the great advantage of the English, who were smart enough to leave things as they found them: a thriving trading society. The Dutch simply had a new lord—the duke, a new king—Charles II (the Restoration and all that); and a new name—New York. The Patroons (the great Dutch land-holding families up-state and around Albany) retained their lands, their titles, and their considerable fortunes into the 20th century. It is no accident that names like Vanderbilt, Van Rensselaer, Van Cortlandt, Bayard, Kouwenhoven and De Witt, not to mention Yonkers still resonate.

The port continued to grow through the colonial revolutionary and federal periods and in the 1840’s an iron man, James Bogardus, invented the first major American contribution to the world of international architecture; cast iron. Bogardus was responsible for the creation of, in effect, a prefabricated iron façade for large buildings which echoed classical styles which included both exterior and interior fluted iron columns and pilasters. A factory owner of taste could order a building façade in “the Italianate Palazzo” style, a “Flemish Castle” style, “Greek Temple” and so on.

One of the great advantages of iron was that the strength of the material could support much larger fenestrations than had theretofore been possible when only small many-paned windows were the rule. The new iron “bays” allowed large sheets of glass to be installed, permitting greatly increased light to flood into buildings. Cast iron ran its course in little more than a half century, with the last structure built in 1900. The Soho Cast Iron Historic District remains the living testament and the largest repository of an astonishing epoch in the story of American architecture.

By the time of the Civil War SoHo was in great flux, with old federal houses being demolished to make way for the new 5-, 6-, and 7-story wonders of heavy beam, brick, stone and cast iron commercial construction. During the same period the surviving old residential houses had become commercialized in a very distinctive way: SoHo had become the most notorious red light district in America, rivaling even Storyville in New Orleans.

Visitors to New York were given handbills extolling the appeal of
certain “ton” houses; i.e., bordellos—all in SoHo. A lonely (or merely horny) visitor was invited to “visit Mrs. Hathaway and view some of her fair Quakeresses” —or “Mrs. Everett whose beautiful senoritas are quite accomplished”—or “Madame Louisa Kanth’s establishment run on the German Order”—or “Miss Virginia Henriques” where “its ladies, its boarders, its fixins and fashions are on the Creole order.” And there were many many more. The United States thoughtfully put one of its soldiers’ “furlough houses” in the middle of all this on Howard Street. All a lonesome boy in blue had to do was step out the door and go around the corner.

The half century between 1850 and 1900 saw the burgeoning of entertainment, commerce and industry in the area. In the 1880’s and Gay Nineties SoHo was a shopping mecca and a center of both high and low entertainments. Some of the early presences in SoHo were Lord & Taylor, Arnold Constable, Tiffany & Co. and the legendary Haughwout Emporium (department store), now Staples, which contains the first commercial-use Otis passenger elevator and it still runs! Grand hotels were scattered throughout: the Union, the City, the Prescott House, The Metropolitan and the lavish St. Nicholas, to name a few. New York’s original “Broadway” was that strip of Broadway between Canal and Houston and boasted 14 theaters including the Lyceum, the Chinese, Buckley’s Minstrel Hall, the Olympic, the American Art Union and the American Musical Institute. One could also pay to view baser “theatrical exhibitions” in many of the multitudinous “ton” houses nearby.

At the end of the 19th century SoHo began a long decline as the epicenter moved north to that new boulevard of dreams, 14th Street and beyond. The vast old factory floors lost their industrial tenants to more efficient spaces further from the center, and the grand stores started migrating north to the rapidly developing Fifth Avenue. The vacated spaces were chopped into warrens housing marginal industries—i.e., sweat shops—relying on abused, over-worked and grossly underpaid immigrant labor. Among hundreds of other things the products were dolls’ wigs, plastic buttons, findings for cheap jewelery and low end garment work. In the late 1960's a new, clandestine, and totally illegal form of occupancy emerged. The new occupants were artists living in the large spaces where they could produce the huge canvases which had become the art of the moment. There were also musicians, dance and theatre companies who lived, created and produced in the large lofts which made their lives and their work financially viable. The SoHo Artists Association and Friends of Cast Iron Architecture joined forces to resist the city’s plans to raze SoHo (to the benefit of private developers), and thanks to the administration of John Lindsay—one of the few (and probably the last) genuinely culturally conscious mayors this city has ever had—the zoning laws were changed to accommodate new uses. The rest is history.

And now to 26 Wooster, where LLGAF will have its new gallery.
This building was erected in 1866, covering 3600 gross square feet, by an architect whose name is unfortunately lost to us. The original owner was one Lewis King, who used the ground floor as a store with loft work spaces above. The building is 5 stories with 6 iron bays and is of massive beam construction, brick, stone and a ground floor cast iron façade dressed with fluted cast iron columns. At some point it was interconnected with 22 Wooster (1868) to the south and later to 28 Wooster (1888) to the north. This building has a handsome cast iron façade (at Grand & Wooster). A ground floor columned cast iron façade sweeps across the frontage of 22, 24, 26, 28, 30 Wooster which, although somewhat irregular (different parts installed at different times) nonetheless creates a visual unity of the three buildings at ground level.

Our new space stands a half block north of what was the Collect Pond and an irregular drainage ditch which was probably organized by Dutch farmers to drain excess water into the Hudson. Hence the “canal” in Canal Street. Next to it on the south was Cripplebush Swamp which is now the site of Lispenard Street.

Our neighborhood’s northern boundary, Houston Street, derives its name from a Dutch holding known as the “Huis Tuin” (pronounced house town) which literally means “house garden.” East of us, near Broadway, lies Howard Street where furloughed soldier boys had easy access to the numerous whore houses spread throughout the neighborhood; and on the west, West Broadway, where the building on the southeast corner at Canal was actually three federal houses joined together and remodeled in the 19th century to become a boarding house for bachelor working men. Wooster Street itself was not formally organized until 1797 and probably derives its name from an early English land owner.

Because of New York’s association with its neglected early Dutch history LLGAF intends to install a commemorative plaque in its new space to memorialize Harman Myndert Van Den Bogaert and his black lover, Tobias, whose family name is regrettably unknown. Their relationship constitutes the first historically verifiable gay love affair in the New World and was one for which they paid a terrible price. It is our aim to remember them.

We look forward to seeing you in the new gallery…Watch for announcements!

NOTE: I am indebted to Russell Shorto’s excellent history of New Amsterdam and New Netherland—The Island at the Center of the World—and Soho/Cast Iron District Manhattan, published by The Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1973, for many of the facts presented in this article.

NOTE: The word SoHo came into general use in the 1960s—it was adopted from the New York City Planning Commission’s term for the area—“The South Houston Industrial District.”