A Mighty Brick House Lets It All Hang Out

You Might Drop a Thing or Two If You Were 132!

By Caitlin Hawke

On October 4th right around the morning exodus, neighbors were roused by some facade drama when a keystone from the quirky but adored Townsend house at 302 W. 102nd Street hit the sidewalk.  Hard.  Splintering in heart-wrenching chunks across the tree-well area.  Having chipped a front tooth, I know the feeling, old girl.

Readers will know the house I am talking about from our homepage -- that great shot by Ozzie Alfonso.  One of the things I have always loved about it is the color of the brick.  It's an eye-poppingly red-orange terra cotta, paired to perfection with lemon chiffon trim.

Terence Hanrahan had a front row seat across the way in his home where he saw firefighters stabilizing the remaining masonry, and he took some of these shots. Now, of course, a sidewalk bridge has gone up.  But I sure hope our Brick Dame will be restored quickly.

Online reports - either the West Side Rag or DNA Info -- mentioned vibrations that perhaps had jarred the keystone loose.  But this house is a tough cookie; she withstood a lot worse over her 132 year life.  If you scroll down, you'll see a shot of the Queen Anne style house when it was brand new and sat in the lot 25 feet south of W. 102nd Street (before 855 West End Avenue was built).  It sat right on the "avenue."  Then it was but a two-story house consisting solely of the current second and third floors which you will see in the side-by-side photos -- they superimpose perfectly!  That old circa 1888 shot came to me by way of Hedy Campbell who acquired it from a longtime Bloomingdaler Marilyn Buckland.

Built in 1884, the Ralph S. Townsend house sat on West End (depicted in the black and white photos below) until 1893 when it was moved to its current site at 302 W. 102nd Street by Clara Delafield. And there it has sat for a century and a quarter.

Alas, the beautiful brick lady is missing a tooth now.  But she's got good bones, that we know.  To my way of thinking, she's the Maggie Smith of Bloomingdale, and she darn well better outlive us one and all.

Come wander by some day and behold her beauty!

Note how these two buildings superimpose perfectly: take the first and second floor of the building in the black and white immage and imagine them bumped up a story to become the second and third floors of the building above in the color picture, and you've got it.  The front door from 1888 became a set of quirky asymmetrical windows.  A new first floor and an additional floor at top -- a mansard roof -- were added when the house rounded the corner in 1893.

Circa 1888, this photo shows W. 102nd Street in the foreground with the little brick house sitting on a lot on the west side of the precursor of West End Avenue a bit south of West 102nd Street in the upper right quadrant. Just five or six years later, the house migrated around the corner to its current site at 302 W. 102nd Street all before 855 West End Avenue was a bustling thoroughfare.

In a map from 1891, the Townsend house is in its original location on West End Avenue 25 feet south of W. 102nd Street (see #35). Note the difference with the map below when nearly every lot on W. 102nd is built on and note how rural our neck of the woods was as recently as 1891! Compare it to the black and white picture which is roughly contemporaneous.

In this Bromley map from 1897, the Townsend house is shown in its current location at 302 W. 102nd Street (see #62)

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