Bond Street today is a pricey place to live. And so it was in the 1830s, when it became one of New York’s most exclusive enclaves.
Wealthy residents fleeing the crowded and increasingly commercial neighborhoods below Houston Street sought refuge on this short little street, which only runs two blocks from Broadway to the Bowery.
To accommodate these fashionable residents, Federal-style houses, typically three or four stories of brick, white trim, dormer windows, and sometimes Classical columns around the entrance, went up in tidy rows.
Most wouldn’t last, of course. Business and industry arrived in the middle of the 19th century, and homeowners who had the means left for newer neighborhoods.
One by one, almost all of the Federal-style homes—which would have been deemed too small for a family home by Gilded Age standards—met the wrecking ball, replaced by commercial buildings.
But the Federal-style house that once stood at 22 Bond Street, just east of Broadway, refuses to completely leave the cityscape.
Its faded, ghostly outline—the peaked roof, the twin chimneys—persist on the side of its former neighbor at 24 Bond Street.
This sweet old house likely looked exactly like the red-brick survivor at 26 Bond Street, which seems to have only been modernized with a fire escape on the facade and air conditioner in one of the dormers.
I don’t know when the house at 22 Bond Street was torn down. But it must have happened in the early 20th century, as the above image from 1940 shows the small squat garage that took its place for several decades.
That 1940 photo also shows the outline of the phantom house, a remnant of antebellum New York that stubbornly rejects the idea of fading into history.
[Third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]