How many times have you walked down a street in New York and suddenly you see something new?
It happened this weekend as I walked around the Lower East Side. Suddenly, I saw something that had been hiding in plain sight – a back tenement.
As property around the LES gets torn down, there are a surprising number of “revelations.” Usually, the revelation is the amount of sun light there is while a lot remains undeveloped. However, on Second Avenue it was a back tenement that I had never noticed.
When the gas station was there on East 1 and 2nd Avenue your attention was drawn to the station, now that it is gone you notice the surrounding buildings.
Back tenements are all over the East and West Villages. They are called that for obvious reasons because they were built behind the tenement that faced the street. A few of them were built at the same time as the front tenement but others were built by landlords trying to get as much money out of their property as possible during the latter half of the 19th century. The back tenements receive very little sun unless a building near them gets torn down. In the West Village, there are some converted carriage houses behind the row houses facing the street. But it is only when something is torn down that this “hidden” part of New York gets revealed. Here’s another one on East 14th Street and Avenue A:
Bowery & Canal 