Life on Colonnade Row: The Hidden History Behind the Columns
For a particular New Yorker, the sort who rues having missed out on the city’s cobblestone past, Colonnade Row is a distinct architectural marvel. The Greek Revival rowhouses were completed in 1833 and are known for their imposing Corinthian columns. But they were also a stage on which the birth of Manhattan’s gilded era played out, a period when no one dared host a ball the same night as Alva Vanderbilt, and the city itself didn’t extend much past Great Jones Street.
PhotoThey were built for families like the Vanderbilts and the Astors — indeed, John Jacob Astor was among the first residents — and the group was originally named La Grange Terrace, after an estate of the Marquis de Lafayette. What remained of the facade was among the first structures protected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
In the landscape of contemporary New York, however, Colonnade Row offers other quirks. While crusty old bars and last-of-their-kind shops are canonized as living history, the imposing Colonnade Row — less out of place in Rome, perhaps, than in the East Village — remains strangely overlooked. They are private residences, partly owned by a family trust, and a number of the 40-some apartments are rent-stabilized. Only the most basic public information exists about life within, which has made visiting the site a tantalizing coup for history lovers. Attending the lectures is a way of exploring without trespassing.
Guests are an eclectic cross-section of New Yorkers, from those who remember when trash-can fires still burned in the neighborhood to students of architecture, and including a tall woman in military boots who was accompanied by a large leashed dog.
Many are experts themselves. When a slide regarding the wedding brunch of John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States, was shown, a couple from Staten Island asked: “The same Tyler as the Tyler house on Staten Island?” The answer was yes. When Mr. Rayhill mentioned the marriage of an early resident to a “gold digger from New Orleans with a checkered past,” a woman chimed in about one of the gold digger’s descendants: “She was my friend’s great-grandmother!”
The tenant of Apartment 2R is Tim Ranney, who started hosting the lectures last April. Mr. Ranney, 55, has lived in Colonnade Row since 1990, when he saw a hand-painted “apartments for rent” sign during an afternoon stroll. At the recent lecture, an early resident of Mr. Ranney’s very apartment was mentioned in passing: “David Gardiner once occupied this space. His daughter then married John Tyler.” Mr. Ranney sat off to the side, wearing Adidas and nursing his punch.
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When he moved into Colonnade Row, Mr. Ranney said, there were tenants paying as little as $90 a month, and he describes his first two decades there like something out of the musical “Rent”: a happy bohemian utopia of artists and strivers, all residing in an old building at a cost of next to nothing. Mr. Ranney is a publicist, has produced theater and babysits bulldogs on the side (his Instagram lists him as the New York “Bullysitter”).
Eccentric types still hang on to apartments, he said, including a flamenco dancer who lives a floor above him. But in a neighborhood where one-bedroom apartments can cost $3,500 a month, tenants appear to prefer that only minimal attention is brought to their fortuitous situation. Indeed, New York-centric blogs have been known to speculate about the building’s interior life; when Mr. Rayhill was conducting research on the building, he found himself stalking the property and calling out to the residents, who emerged on their balconies.
Colonnade Row does have two prominent commercial enterprises on its ground floors: Indochine, the French-Vietnamese restaurant and longtime fashion industry haunt, which opened in 1984, and the home of the Blue Man Group, which hosts its flagship show in a ground-floor theater and owns the building above it.
Mr. Rayhill speculated that the building has defied destruction because selling off the structure in its entirety would generate too much red tape. “It’s a byzantine affair,” he said. “Too many groups are represented. The same problem it has getting restored is the same reason it can’t be destroyed into some Disneyland.”
At the end of a recent lecture, Mr. Ranney went downstairs to Indochine and ordered a martini at the bar. The bartender recognized him and said it was on the house. Reflecting on his tenure in Colonnade Row, Mr. Ranney said, “More and more it’s just an honor and a privilege to live here.”
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Tickets to the lectures cost around $30 (Mr. Ranney maintains they are less for profit and more for operational costs), and although they often focus on Colonnade Row, they sometimes center on the history in the building’s orbit. In addition to Mr. Rayhill, who conducts the foundational Colonnade Row lecture, Gary Lawrance, an architect who specializes in preservation, sometimes speaks on New York’s gilded era. Future lectures will cover the shopping habits of society women on old Broadway and the Vanderbilt costume ball of 1883.
An intermission arrived at the most recent lecture. Mr. Rayhill had been holding forth on the aristocrats Catharine Lorillard Wolfe and David Thompson and his wife, “who was said to host very lavish parties.” The couple from Staten Island, Dennis and Rose DeLuccio, stepped out onto Lafayette Street for a cigarette.
“I’ve walked by this building a million times, and I’ve always imagined what goes on inside,” Ms. DeLuccio, 59, said. “I finally had an opportunity.”
In attendance was also Margaret Halsey Gardiner, 68, the executive director of the Merchant’s House Museum, which is considered the last fully preserved 19th-century family home in New York, and is just down the block. Ms. Gardiner acknowledged that there were few young faces in the audience but dismissed the notion that it meant the subject matter was dull.
“The history of New York is dramatic,” she said in Mr. Ranney’s hallway. “New York is the biggest drama there ever was.”
David Byars, an editor at Vogue and a passionate student of New York history, also considered the logic of learning about an old building in a city that constantly tears them down. After a long evening of somewhat dry remarks, he offered something close to emotion.
“Everything can’t be brand-new,” Mr. Byars said. “You wouldn’t have any comparison. You wouldn’t have any history.”
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the surname of a man who lives in Colonnade Row. As the article correctly notes, he is Tim Ranney, not Rainey.
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