In 1837, the Board of Aldermen proposed extending and widening Centre Street from Broome to Houston Streets. Residents and businessmen revolted, firing off several petitions to the Mayor opposing the project. One of them decried the "destroying, mutilating, and injuring every street, lot and building in its course." Among the signors of that petition was "Rose Dunn, No. 21 Prince street, owner."
Born in 1795, Rosanna Dunn owned several properties in the neighborhood. Twice widowed, she lived in the 21-foot wide, Federal style house at 21 Prince Street with her sons, Anthony and James Conron. (The boys were from her marriage to Lack Conron.) Three-and-a-half stories tall, the house was faced in Flemish bond brick. In the rear yard was a second, smaller house, which earned the family extra income.
Rosanna died "of inflammation of the lungs," according to the New York Herald, on January 26, 1851 at the age of 56. Her funeral was held in the house two days later.
James and Anthony Conron, who operated a liquor store (or saloon) by 1853, remained in the house for years, taking in boarders. In 1853, for instance, Henry Barrett, a porter; and Patrick Rourke, an engineer in the New-York Tribune building, lived in the main house. (As an engineer, Rourke would have been responsible for tending the Tribune building's furnaces and such.) Thomas Stanton lived in the rear house.
Anthony Conron was a member of the volunteer military organization, the Gallagher Guard. An announcement in the New York Herald in 1859 noted, "A meeting of the above named company will be held at the house of Anthony Conron, No. 21 Prince street, on Sunday, Sept. 11, at 3 o'clock P. M. Members will please be punctual in attendance."
Following what the New York Herald described as "a protracted illness," Anthony Conron died on May 27, 1864. His brother is no longer listed at 21 Prince Street afterward.
The Conron house became a boarding house--one that must have been tightly packed. In 1867, there were seven boarders. Interestingly, several were involved in the apparel trades. Dominick Gaffey and Patrick Glennen were tailors; Eliza Reynolds listed her profession as "cloaks;" and James Pender was a shoemaker. Two other boarders, William Delaney and Daniel Dunn, were laborers. Bridget Hackett, the widow of Patrick Hackett, lived here and most likely ran the house. The rear building was home to Edward Daly.
By the time Patrick Daly purchased the property for $11,700 (about $391,000 in 2024) in December 1886, the ground floor had been converted to a store. The Record & Guide described the lot as having a "three-story and store building on the front and three-story building on the rear."
Four months later, Daly hired architect William Grant to design alterations to the front building. His plans called for raising the attic to a full floor, rearranging the interior walls, and rebuilding "defective parts in rear wall." Grant's renovations gave the ground floor a cast iron storefront with two stores. Elaborate, triangular, pressed metal pediments filled with frothy Beaux Arts decorations were placed over the upper floor openings. The windows were, as well, given decorative terra cotta frames, and delicate Greek key bands in terra cotta joined the lintels of the openings at each level. An ambitious cast metal Italianate cornice completed the design. (The new fourth floor can be discerned by the change from Flemish to running bond brickwork.)
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image from the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.
Patrick Daly's tenants continued to be foreign-born workers. One, living above the stores in 1887, placed an advertisement in The Sun that November that read, "A respectable woman wishes a situation as cook, washer, and ironer; wages not so much an object as a good home."
Edward Kraus and his wife lived here in 1891. Kraus ran a butcher shop on Mulberry Street between Spring and Prince Streets. On June 17, he left to collect a bill on the Bowery. The Sun reported, "That was the last seen of him alive."
Two weeks later, on June 30, a body washed ashore on Coney Island. When no one came to identify it, the corpse was buried in a numbered grave in Flatbush, Brooklyn two days later. That night, Brooklynite friends of Mrs. Kraus wrote to her, saying the description of the man matched that of her husband. She went to Brooklyn and had the body exhumed. The Sun said, "It was too much decomposed to identify it positively, but from certain marks on the legs, she felt confident the body was her husband's."
Mrs. Kraus told her reporters that Edward had "complained of the heat just before he started out." She surmised, "it affected his mind and that he may have jumped overboard in a moment of aberration." The Sun added, "Kraus had no reasons for committing suicide so far as known. He owned a flourishing business, and was happy in his domestic relations." Apparently, the possibility of foul play was not considered.
Another tragedy occurred the following year. On May 16, 1892, the News Press reported, "John Connolley, of 21 Prince street, an alcoholic patient of St. Francis hospital in Fifth street, jumped from the second story window of the hospital and was mortally hurt."
Hugh Madden lived here in 1894. Described by The Evening World as "a poor cobbler, twenty-eight years old," Madden attempted to do a good deed on September 13 that year. But it backfired.
A friend had been incarcerated in the Raymond Street jail in Brooklyn for several days. Madden attempted to sneak a flask of whiskey to him, but it went horribly wrong. The Evening World reported, "At the door Madden was met by Keeper John Bell...and searched. Keeper Bell found the neck of the flask protruding from his visitor's stocking." Now, Hugh Madden, too, was jailed. He was taken before Warden Shanley "who, in a deep voice, Madden says, asked him if he knew what a grievous offense he had committed."
Late in January 1896, Edward Maher was released from jail after serving a two-week sentence for domestic abuse on his wife. Days later, on February 7, The New York Times reported that he was being held without bail "for assaulting his wife and causing internal injuries."
Patrick Daly sold the property in May 1904. The buyer, Rocco Mansella, resold it to Pasquale and Salvatore Pati in April 1907. The father-and-son team, who operated as P. Pati & Son, hired architect Otto Reissmann in October to replace the outhouse with a "one-story brick and stone" version. The elaborate privy cost them the equivalent of $23,400 today.
The outhouse would not last long. In 1908, the property was sold in foreclosure to Frank Verrastro. He would run a store from the ground level into the 1920s. In March 1910, he brought Otto Reissmann back to modernize the building. Among the renovations was indoor plumbing and toilets.
Luigi Onofrio was pulled into a gruesome murder case in 1910. After religious services on June 17, Moses Sachs went missing. The body of the 60-year-old jewelry peddler was found the following morning "crammed into a trunk in the lower hallway of an Italian tenement at 51 Goerck Street," reported The New York Times on June 19. He had been strangled and robbed of about $3,000 worth of jewelry and $200 in cash.
Before police arrived, someone spirited away a piece of evidence. Two days later, The New York Sun reported that officials learned that a business card "was shaken out of a sort of table cloth which lay upon the jewelry pedler's [sic] body." The card read:
Luigi Onforio
21 Prince street. Candy manufacturer
The New York Sun said, "It was a brand new business card, freshly printed, unsoiled and a very poor specimen of typography." Police suspected that the card was an attempt to frame Onofrio. "The blundering printer transposed two letters," explained The Sun. And, in addition to misspelling Onofrio's surname, while the address was correct (he lived on the top floor of 21 Prince Street), "so far as one knows he manufactured no candy nor indeed anything but wondrous tales."
According to Eric Ferrara in his 2011 Manhattan Mafia Guide, at mid-century the ground floor of 21 Prince Street was home to the Thompson Social Club, a hangout of underworld figures like gangster Peter Di Palermo.
The last quarter of the 20th century saw tremendous change in the neighborhood. In the 1980s, Prince Street Editions occupied the commercial space, publishing art calendars. The Laughing Cat antiques shop was here by the mid-1990s, and at the turn of the century the space became home to the Ina consignment shop, which remains there.
photographs by the author
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