CB2 to Consider Support of 200-Year-Old Federal House on the Bowery

Preservation efforts to save 206 Bowery again kicked into high gear earlier this month. Fear is rampant among these building advocates that the Landmark Preservation Commission – charged with saving the city’s beloved architecture – will let the Federal-style row house drop from its calendar at the end of this year.

Led by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, among others, the campaign to save 206 Bowery began in 2010. It continues tonight with a visit to the Landmarks subcommittee of Community Board 2 later this evening. Advocates seek support to designate the 200-year-old house an historic landmark.

This potential “de-calendar” 206 Bowery is owed in large part to the passage last year of the Intro. 775 bill in City Council aimed at removing the clutter, as it were, from the agency’s calendar. The so-called “anti-landmark bill” essentially establishes “do or die” deadlines for landmark designations that have been stagnating. Meaning, if the LPC doesn’t vote on proposed individual landmarks within one year (two years for districts), then the proposals are removed from the docket.

206 Bowery, for its part, is one of the last intact Federal-era row houses on the Bowery. It remarkably survives in close to original condition from the first period of development along this stretch of the Bowery. The modest 2 ½-story, three bay-wide building has one-foot thick walls of Flemish-bond brickwork, a stone foundation and a gambrel roof with paired gable dormers. It was likely erected around 1825 as part of a group that included the houses sharing party walls at 202, 204 and 208 Bowery.

Since the 1870s, the ground floor has reportedly been used solely for commercial purposes.

You can support the cause by attending the meeting tonight at 6:30pm, Little Red School House, 272 Sixth Avenue.