This month in real estate history

1973: Soho designated city historic district

Soho, the growing artist neighborhood that was once a thriving manufacturing district, was designated as a historic district by the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission 41 years ago this month.

The Soho-Cast Iron Historic District was bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Canal and Crosby streets, and included 26 city blocks given character by 19-century loft buildings with cast-iron facades. The law made it more difficult to tear down or alter the approximately 500 buildings within the neighborhood.

The vote for the city’s 23rd historic district came three years after New York allowed artists to occupy Soho’s former mercantile buildings for residential and studio use. That drove up real estate values and brought in an influx of art galleries and restaurants.

The landmark district was extended in May 2010, to include 135 properties west of West Broadway and east of Crosby. The trade group the Real Estate Board of New York highlighted Soho in a 2013 report as one of the city’s neighborhoods where a high number of landmarked buildings makes affordable housing more difficult to develop.

The Collyer Brothers’ home

1942: Bank forecloses on legendary Collyer home

The Bowery Savings Bank filed to foreclose on the Harlem brownstone where the reclusive brothers Homer and Langley Collyer lived 72 years ago this month. The move to take the house came five years before they died inside it, victims of the home’s 100 tons of refuse and clutter.

The brothers’ parents purchased the four-story home at 2078 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 128th Street, in 1909. By 1929, both parents had died, and the brothers, then in their late 40s, lived alone. At about that time, the gas, phone and electricity were cut off.

Homer, an attorney, was by then crippled and blind, and Langley, once a concert pianist, rarely ventured out. They became infamous in the neighborhood as hermits.

The bank filed to foreclose after the brothers stopped making payments on their $6,700 mortgage, and won a court order to evict them. But instead, the two sides reached an arrangement for the brothers to remain.

In March 1947, an anonymous tip notified authorities that Homer was dead. Police, because of the clutter, entered through the second floor to remove his body. There was no sign of his brother. Nearly three weeks later, Langley’s body was discovered, smothered by an avalanche of books and newspapers. The house was demolished three months later.

The extreme clutter in the home gave rise within the Fire Department to the phrase “Collyers’ Mansion,” still used today to describe similarly dangerous conditions.

Waterfront property

1909: City checks deeds in England, Holland

In an effort to lay claim to former waterfront property that was now terra firma along the East and Hudson rivers, the City of New York scoured old deeds not only locally but also in England and Holland, the city’s Law Department affirmed, 105 years ago this month.

The city spent several years trying to confirm whether it owned stakes in real estate created by landfill along the waterfront on Lower Manhattan’s East Side from Pearl Street to the water’s edge, between approximately the Brooklyn Bridge and the lower tip of Manhattan; and on the West Side from Greenwich Street to the water, from about Gansevoort Street to the Battery.

Laws that gave the city ownership of land between the high and low tides justified the search. Since that area kept creeping outward with Manhattan’s expansion by landfill, the Law Department sought to discover if it was in some instances still the fee owner of land that collectively was then worth millions of dollars.

Many of the city’s major property owners had stakes in the real estate in question, such as the Rhinelanders, the Goelets, the Schermerhorns and Trinity Church.

Despite the exhaustive effort costing thousands of dollars, it does not appear that any major “lost stakes” were ever uncovered.