On 2nd Avenue, historic Isaac T. Hopper House hits the market for the first time in 149 years

A historic East Village building is for sale for the first time since (checking notes) 1874.

There's a new listing for 110 Second Ave., aka the landmarked and currently vacant Isaac T. Hopper House between Sixth Street and Seventh Street. 

Per the listing via Denham Wolf Real Estate Services: The property is vacant and provides a unique redevelopment opportunity. Asking price: $7.1 million. The building also has "+-4,628 ZFA potential excess development rights." (Any alterations to the landmarked building must go through the Landmarks Preservation Commission and other city agencies.)

The Women's Prison Association has owned it since 1874.

Here's some history of the address of No. 110, built circa 1837-1838, via Village Preservation:

This three-and-a-half-story Greek Revival structure is a rare surviving house from the period when this section of Second Avenue was one of the most elite addresses in Manhattan. Additionally, it is also a rare surviving nineteenth-century institutional presence in this ever-changing neighborhood.

The house at 110 Second Avenue was constructed as one of four houses built for brothers Ralph, Staats, and Benjamin Mead and designed in the Greek Revival style. Although the only one remaining of the original four houses, 110 Second Ave. retains much of its original details characteristic of a Greek Revival row house. The façade is clad in machine-pressed red brick laid in stretcher bond, tall parlor-level windows with a cast iron balcony, a denticulated cornice, and a brownstone portico with ionic columns supporting an entablature.

In 1839 David H. Robertson, a shipbroker and tradesman, bought the house for his widowed mother, Margaret. Three years later, however, he declared bankruptcy. The house was foreclosed, and in 1844 it was auctioned and transferred to Ralph Mead. Mead was the proprietor of Ralph Mead and Co., a wholesale grocery business. He and his second wife, Ann Eliza Van Wyck, lived at 110 Second Avenue (then No. 108) from 1845-1857. After that, they leased the house but retained ownership until 1870. It was sold in 1872 to George H. and Cornelia Ellery, who then sold it in 1874 to the Women's Prison Association ...

In 1992, the Hopper House was renovated and re-opened as a residential alternative to imprisonment for women. The residents and staff were displaced when the six-alarm fire destroyed Middle Collegiate Church next door in December 2020.

In January, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to allow the demolition of the remains of the fire-damaged structure to allow Middle Collegiate to rebuild on the site.

Previously on EVG:

• At the first WPA Arts exhibition

At the first WPA Arts exhibition

Last night, the Women’s Prison Association (WPA), an advocacy organization dating here to 1845 devoted to women with criminal backgrounds, held its very first art exhibit in the Isaac T. Hopper Home on Second Avenue between Sixth Street and Seventh Street.

Here's more about the exhibit and WPA Arts:

The women of Hopper Home have been busy creating everything from paintings and quilted scapes to poetry, each finding strength and healing through their mediums and in their community.

WPA Arts utilizes the power of the creative arts as a conduit to care for women in all areas of the criminal justice system and at any stage of their work with WPA.

WPA Arts groups feature a wide variety of arts-based activities including theater-based techniques, playmaking and role play, creative writing and poetry, and visual arts and music as the basis for a series of targeted workshops designed to enhance and supplement the quality of care for our women.

Participants are supported by their peers in a safe and secure group setting. They engage in fun, thought-provoking, and self-esteem building activities that improve their skills and harness the power of their own imaginations as stepping stones to making positive changes in their lives.

EVG contributor Stacie Joy attended the exhibit, and shared these photos...

Second Avenue, before the 'giant fraternity party'

Christopher Gray at The New York Times has a piece on the history of Second Avenue in today's paper ...

Second Avenue opened after the adoption of the grid plan in 1811, and wealthy families put up comfortable brick Greek Revival houses, like the Isaac Hopper house at 110 Second Avenue (above), nearly intact from the 1830s.

[Early 2012]

And you may not notice the beauty of No. 149 ... with the distraction of the kegs and stench of chicken wings from the 13th Step...


[Yesterday]

But, at one time...

Another town house from the 1840s is 149 Second Avenue; it still has its stoop and is comparatively little altered, although there’s a big skylight on the roof that must give some apartment plenty of sun. The 1870 census records the occupants as Edward Jaffray, a socially prominent dry goods importer, his family of five and nine servants.

And what about today's Second Avenue?

There is still some of the old egg-cream-ethnic left on Second Avenue, but now the chief cultural group is 20-something singles, who spill onto the sidewalks like a giant fraternity party, more ebullient than disorderly, even with plenty of beer.

Read the whole article here.

Free chairs (and history!) on Second Avenue

This was the scene a little earlier outside 110 Second Ave. near East Seventh street... a lot of free chairs. (Have no idea if they are still there.) Photos by Derek Berg.





Anyway! Lots of history at this address — the Isaac T. Hopper Home, a circa 1839 Greek Revival townhouse that serves as a halfway house for female prisoners.

The Times had a feature on the home a few years back:

In 1846, The Evening Post said that there were “two great avenues for elegant residences”: Fifth and Second Avenues. Construction on Second had already produced chaste Greek Revival houses like No. 110, built in 1838 and soon occupied by Ralph Mead, a merchant on Coenties Slip. The simple red-brick front is relieved only by a projecting portico with brownstone Ionic columns — the Greek was a movement of buttoned-up reserve.

By that time Isaac T. Hopper was famous in New York as an uncompromising reformer and abolitionist. On his death in 1852, The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper, said that “the fugitive slave, the unfortunate criminal, the children of poverty, all commanded his warmest sympathy.” From his work evolved the Isaac T. Hopper Home, devoted to helping women who had been released from prison.

Read the whole article here.