119 East 10th Street; 109-119 East 10th Street | Block : 466 | Lot #48

Description & Building Alterations

Numbers 109 through 117 East 10th Street were constructed in 1856 on land received by Hamilton Fish from the estate of his uncle, Peter Gerard Stuyvesant. The lots were then sold for development pursuant to the covenant that no offensive or noxious uses be established on the property – including tenement houses. These were built as moderately-sized Italianate townhouses, each three bays wide and three stories tall. Developer James Thorburn constructed No. 117 East 10th Street. This house and its neighbor at No. 115, however, had much of their original Italianate detail spared when the buildings were unified in 1919 by St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and incorporated into the existing residence club operated in the adjacent buildings. This group of houses is part of the St. Mark’s Place Historic District, and more information is available in the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation report.

Number 119 is a handsome larger Greek Revival house, constructed in 1845 for Joseph Russell. The building retains its original ornamentation but has had its original door replaced with one in the Italianate style. It too was a part of the Stuyvesant Residence Club owned by St. Mark’s Church. Included in the St. Mark’s Historic District established in 1969, more information on this building can be found in the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation report.
Collectively, these buildings have been home to a number of notable figures in the arts. Saul Leiter, one of the masters of 20th century photography, lived at 111 East 10th Street from 1952 to 2013. Many of his most iconic shots were taken of the surrounding neighborhood. The Saul Leiter Foundation currently maintains his original studio as their office space.

Art critic Harold Rosenberg, author of “On the Fall of Paris” and champion of the American Abstract Expressionist painters, lived at no. 117 in the mid-20th century. Around the same time, Nancy Macdonald, an anarchist who founded the Spanish Refugee Aid to provide support to the non-Communist exiles of Franco’s regime in 1953, also lived at this location. Her husband Dwight Macdonald became the founding editor of the Partisan Review in the 1930s, and during World War II he founded the antiwar magazine Politics, for which Nancy served as managing editor. The couple operated the publication out of their apartment from 1943 until 1949, featuring the writing of Andre Gide, Albert Camus, Victor Serge, Simone Weil, Bruno Bettelheim, Meyer Schapiro, John Berryman, Marianne Moore, and Mary McCarthy, among others. From 1951 until 1971, Dwight worked on his own writing and contributed to The New Yorker. A host of literary, artistic, and political figures gathered at the apartment over the half-century the couple lived here, including T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, and Alexander Calder, who also lived at no. 119 for a time (see below).

No. 119 East 10th Street has been home to several sculptors. First, from 1915 to 1919 sculptor Blanca Will lived here. By 1925 sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder and his wife Nannette Lederer Calder, also an artist, lived here. Periodically living with them was their son Alexander Calder, well known for his innovative sculptural mobiles. He listed 119 East 10th Street as his address in the 1925 catalogue for the Ninth Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Waldorf-Astoria New York where he exhibited his work, The Eclipse. More recently, sculptor Robert Gober, whose work has been featured at The Museum of Modern Art, lived in a duplex apartment on the second and third floors.