232 East 11th Street | Block : 466 | Lot #25

Description & Building Alterations

The Ernest Flagg Rectory of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, as it is known today, was designed in a simple Beaux-Arts style by renowned architect Ernest Flagg in 1900 for the Episcopal congregation at the church. The three-story house has a metal mansard roof set with ovular windows and a porch to the rear which faces the church.

Bohemian poet Harry Kemp lived here with his wife Francis McClernan in 1924, after moving from Greenwich Village, where he had lived since 1912. Harry and Francis were some of the early members of the bohemia that would emerge in the East Village, then still known as the Lower East Side.

In 1988 a fire destroyed the interior of the house, but when reconstruction was completed ten years later the building became the home of the Neighborhood Preservation Center, a coalition of non-profits focused on neighborhood-based civic engagement and preservation activity. The Neighborhood Preservation Center is home to the offices of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and is open to the public. This building is part of the St. Mark’s Historic District, designated 1969. More information is available in the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation report.