NEW YORK CITY’S IRISH HOUSE OF LORDS (1912)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** “(New York City) is never the same city for a dozen years together. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew. If he chance to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate. But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him, as a city, are gone.” – Harper’s Monthly, 1856 ******************************************************************************************************************************** It was an unassuming ancient wood-frame house – said to be one of the last of its kind in Yorkville – and it was entering its final Fenian days. The building, which had been purchased half a century before in 1860, at the princely sum of $10K, by the then-current owner, John Sheehy, had, through the death of said owner, been forced in 1912 upon the chopping block for sale to the highest bidder. The history of the structure, though, had been more known, in some ways, to the British War Department of the past half century than it had been, generally, to many of the locals of Yorktown where it had sit for more than most could remember. For, it had taken on the fantastical aura of the gathering place of patriots, as well as the auspicious mantel of the “Irish […]
