The Lost Park Cottage - Central Park West and 70th Street

 

A stone carriage step sits on the curb around 1890. photo by Robert L. Bracklow,  from the collection of the Library of Congress (cropped)

When Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted won the Central Park Competition in 1858, Eighth Avenue above 58th Street was undeveloped other than scattered, scraggly garden farms.  On February 26, 1869, The Jewish Messenger commented, 

If any Gothamite of twenty-five years ago had intimated that he had faith in Eighth Avenue lots, he would have been pronounced worthy of confinement at Bloomingdale, the natural end of such speculations.

(The "Bloomingdale" to which the writer referred was the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.)  But the developing park, the end of the Civil War, and the relentless expansion of the city northward was changing the area.  The Jewish Messenger's article continued, "The suggestion of a grand future for the Western boundary of our Park is no longer regarded as ridiculous--it will be a formidable rival to 'the finest street in the world.'"

The "finest street in the world," at the time, of course, was Fifth Avenue.  And the journalist's prediction that Eighth Avenue (later Central Park West) would become one of the preeminent residential thoroughfares in Manhattan was already proving viable.

Just days before that article, the southwest corner of Central Park West and West 70th Street was purchased for $25,000 (about $594,000 by 2025 terms).  The Jewish Messenger noted that the sale price for the vacant corner lot would have purchased the entire block a generation earlier.

The parcel was resold on December 29, 1876.  A prim, two-story frame building was erected on the site.  The vernacular style structure shared the block with wooden houses erected a generation earlier.

The edifice was leased to H. C. Borger, who moved his family into the upper floor and operated his Park Cottage, a tavern and restaurant, downstairs.  

Ole Hille came to New York City from Denmark and found a job as a waiter here as early as 1886.  He shared a room nearby with another bachelor.  On the night of February 25, 1887, the roommate panicked when he discovered that Ole had taken laudanum.  The drug, a mixture of opium and alcohol, was considered a panacea at the time.  But it was also a popular and convenient means of suicide.  The roommate rushed out to find a policeman, and Ole was arrested.  (Attempted suicide was a jailable offense in the 19th century.)

After sitting in jail for two days, Ole Hille faced a magistrate in the Harlem Court.  Happily for the Danish waiter, The Sun reported, "Hille said he took the drug for neuralgia.  He was discharged."

Rowhouses had reached the area when the Park Cottage (right) and its neighboring houses were photographed around 1890.  photograph by Robert Bracklow from the collection of the Library of Congress.

The Park Cottage was lost in foreclosure in 1893.  By then, the neighborhood around the wooden building would have been unrecognizable to the journalist from The Jewish Messenger nearly three decades earlier.  Rows of modern houses and apartment buildings surrounded the block and the anachronistic structures upon it faced inevitable doom.

On June 8, 1895, The Sun reported that Congregation Shearith Israel, "recently purchased a parcel of ground on the southwest corner of Central Park West and Seventieth street."  The article said the congregation "is about to erect on this site a new synagogue there."

photo by Wurts Bros. from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

The Park Cottage and at least one of its neighbors were demolished for the striking Congregation Shearith Israel synagogue, designed by Arnold W. Brunner and Thomas Tyron.