Around 1844, a brick-faced house and store was erected at 166 Eighth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets. Three stories tall, its Greek Revival design included a single-doored residential entrance flanked by pilasters and four-paned sidelights. A commodious transom allowed natural light into the foyer. The building's six-over-six-paned windows sat upon plain brownstone sills and wore understated stone lintels.
Archibald Donnelly operated a tavern here in 1845, but his venture was short lived. As early as 1848 James Condie and his family lived in the upper floors. He was a partner in the Gabaudan & Condie apothecary that now occupied the store.
The drugstore was a vehicle for an enterprising chemist in September 1848. His ads appeared throughout the Northeast saying:
Messrs. Gabaudan & Condie, Druggists, No. 166 Eighth Avenue, state that this past summer they sold Mr. Lawrence, a Police Officer, six bottles of Dr. Roger's Liverwort and Tar. His wife afterwards called upon them, and said that her husband had been, for some time time, lying very low with Consumption, and that the Physician and their friends had despaired of his recovery; but by the use of the above six bottles, he was restored to perfect health. She says she has no doubt but that it was the above Medicine alone which cured him.
James Condie was born in Perthshire, Scotland. Both he and his wife, the former Sarah Ellen Harrison, were born in 1820. In addition to running the drugstore, he volunteered as a "laddie" at Laurel Hose Company, No. 30 on West 27th Street. Five children would be born in the Eighth Avenue house--Sarah Ellen in 1849, Mary Catherine in 1854, Ellen Condie two years later, Samuel Harrison in 1859, and Ella Grace in 1862.
As was common, the Condies rented a room in their home. In 1851 Jane E. Percy lived here. She was a teacher in Colored Primary School No. 3 on West 15th Street. The following year Underwood Montgomery rented the room. He was a mechanist and a sexton of the West Twenty-Third Street Presbyterian Church. Montgomery would remain with the Condies at least through 1856.
James and Sarah Ellen would suffer grief while living here. On December 7, 1857, little Ellen died 21 days after her first birthday. And Samuel Harrison Condie died at the age of one year and 11 months on February 2, 1861. The miniature caskets of both children sat in the parlor until their funerals.
In 1866, Condie sold the building and the business to Robert Blackburn. He commuted from his home in New Jersey while James Whittet, who apparently worked for Blackburn, occupied the upper portion of 166 Eighth Avenue. Born in 1833, Whittet and his wife, Catherine Loehmert, had four children. The Whittets' residency would be rather short-lived and by 1864 David J. Hughes, a policeman, lived here. He was followed by Thomas Ormiston, a native of Skirling, Peebleshire, Scotland, who died in the house at the age of 57 on August 27, 1866.
Beginning about 1873, the Webster family lived above the drugstore. William Webster was a carpenter and Charles ran a liquor store or saloon next door at 168 Eighth Avenue. William changed profession and in 1876 was listed as a policeman.
That year Robert Blackburn and two other druggists fell victim to con artist James Nagle. On April 21, 1876, the New York Herald said, "His trick is an old one." Nagle would ask for five cents worth of salts and give the druggist a five dollar bill. "When the change was given he claimed that it was $1 short and demanded $1 extra," explained the article. Police caught up with Nagle and charged him "of swindling."
Like the Condies had done, the Websters took in a roomer. Mary Scott House moved in with the family in November 1877. Described by the New York Evening Express as belonging "to one of the best families in the State," Mary House was in desperate straits. A few weeks earlier, on October 23, she had married Elijah S. House ("a member of an aristocratic family in Troy," according to the New York Evening Express). The newlyweds checked into the New York Hotel. The newspaper reported that House, "left the hotel on November 1st, saying he was going to get some money, and did not return. Four or five days after she received a letter from him telling her to go back among her friends, and she then found he had abandoned her."
The Websters may have given Mary House a room out of sympathy. The New York Evening Express said, "All the money [House] gave her since her marriage was fifty cents." She complained to the police, who finally found and arrested Elijah S. House, who was living with Emma Scott at 186 Thompson Street.
House defended his actions saying, in part, that Mary had told him "she was worth money in her own right," but after their marriage he discovered she was "deeply in debt and wanted him to pay her debts." Additionally, "her temper became so irritable that he could not live with her." Surprisingly, Justice Bixby discharged House because he had lost his job and could not support his wife. He told Mary, "that she could have her husband rearrested whenever she was able to prove he was earning any money."
In February 1878, Robert Blackburn had a more serious concern than swindling to worry about. His clerk, Edward Wall, filled a prescription for Sophia Brown. The 20-year-old was pregnant at the time. Dr. Bremen later said he prescribed ten pills that contained, in total, "one-fifth of a grain of Hyoscyamus." (Hyoscyamus is a toxic plant used in small doses to treat nervous disorders or problems with sleeping.) Instead, Wall put one-fifth of a grain of the poisonous ingredient into each pill--ten times the prescribed amount.
Sophia Brown took one of the pills at 7:00 on the evening of February 12 and died within an hour. Dr. Bremen went to the Blackburn drugstore and discovered Wall's mistake. Rather astonishingly, on February 19 a coroner's jury decided that Robert Blackburn and Edward Wall were innocent of malpractice. The New York Times reported that the jury felt that Sophia Brown died "from a miscarriage, and that they knew not whether it had been brought about in an artificial or natural manner."
John Alexander Whittet had lived above the store in 1866 as a five-year-old while his father, James Whittet, worked in the Blackburn pharmacy. In 1882, now a young man, he purchased the drugstore. He had inherited $10,000 from his father's estate the previous year. (The figure would translate to a considerable $325,000 in 2026.) Whittet was originally successful, but a failed romance led to his downfall.
Four years later, on December 15, 1886, The New York Times reported, "He was paying attentions to a young lady living in Carlton-avenue, Brooklyn, but their engagement was broken off." According to relatives, Whittet went on a drunken, year-long spree. The New York Times said, "He did a good business until he contracted habits of intemperance." Under pressure from relatives, he agreed to "become an inmate of the Christian Home for Intemperate men, but he withdrew his consent."
In order to "save him from complete destruction," as worded by the newspaper, "his relatives interposed." On December 14, 1886, police arrested John Alexander Whittet from behind the counter of his drugstore. His grandmother, Margaret Ormiston, had "charged him with being an habitual drunkard," said the article.
Daniel R. Woollett, a printer, obtained the property shortly afterward. Born in London in July 1838, he came to America in 1851. An employer of the printing firm Styles & Cash, Wollett was an active member of the Masonic Tabernacle Lodge No. 598. He and his family moved into the upper floors of 166 Eighth Avenue.
At the same time, the Van Valkenburgh & Rickey drugstore took over the ground floor space. That partnership dissolved in 1889 and August Weber took over the shop for his grocery business. He moved in with the Wollett family.
Weber was chosen as a jury member in 1899 in one of New York City's most famous murder cases. Roland Burnham Molineux attempted to eliminate a romantic rival, Harry Seymour Cornish, by poisoning a bottle of Emerson's Bromo-Seltzer with cyanide of mercury. Instead, Cornish's cousin, Katherine Adams, took the medicine for a headache. She died within a few minutes. (The court case resulted in a landmark ruling that restricted prosecutors from presenting evidence of previous crimes.)
August Weber's grocery store was pointed out by The Evening Post in July 1902 as one of the outlets within Manhattan deemed by Dr. R. A. Witthaus of Cornell University Medical College as having, "pure, wholesome, and reliable food products."
Daniel R. Woollett died on October 30, 1904 at the age of 66. His funeral was held in the parlor of 166 Eighth Avenue two days later.
The former Weber grocery store space was leased to Daniel Reeves, Inc. in April 1915. The name was familiar to New Yorkers and this store would be one of hundreds of Daniel Reeves groceries throughout the New York City area.
Renting a room here in 1917 was Irish-born Margaret T. J. Curley, who worked as a stenographer. The fiery-tempered woman attended what the New-York Tribune described as "a soapbox meeting of the Friends of Irish Freedom" at Broadway and 35th Street on August 29 that year. What started as a peaceful protest ended in anything but that. The New-York Tribune began an article saying, "Heads were broken, women trampled and eight persons arrested last night in two riots which followed the attempts of the police to disperse a crowd of three thousand persons."
Enraged after three orators were hauled off the platform by police only minutes after starting speaking, Margaret T. J. Curley jumped into action. The New-York Tribune reported, "A woman, madly shrieking that she was a suffragette, leaped to the platform, tore off her hat and began waving the [Irish] flag." The article said, "Miss Curley was arrested."
The Daniel Reeves grocery store was the scene of an armed robbery on March 26, 1927. The New York Times reported that two armed men, "forced the manager, John Cleary and a woman customer, to the rear, rifled the till of $300 and escaped in a waiting automobile."
In 1929, an Art Deco storefront composed of Vitreous enamel panels was installed. By 1938, Freddy's Food Market had supplanted Daniel Reeves in the store. With Prohibition repealed, in 1938 the grocery obtained a license to sell beer and wine.
In 1941, the Greek Revival entrance, the six-over-six windows and the modest cornice were intact. via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.
The second half of the 20th century saw a decline in the Eighth Avenue neighborhood. But a renaissance at the turn of the century saw trendy shops and restaurants filling the storefronts. La Chinita Linda, a Cuban-Chinese restaurant, occupied the ground floor of 166 Eighth Avenue. Richard Laermer's 2002 Native's Guide to New York said it "has fab black beans."
Distressingly mutilated today, only the Flemish bond brickwork and now-painted brownstone lintels and sills of 166 Eighth Avenue survive to testify of the building's venerable history.
photographs by the author
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