127, 129 and 131 MacDougal Street

History and architecture

The rowhouses at 127, 129 and 131 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village were constructed c. 1828-29 in the Federal style, characterized by its 2-1/2-story height, Flemish bond brickwork, low stoop with wroughtironwork, entrance with Ionic columns, entablature and transom, molded lintels with end blocks, peaked roof, molded cornice, and pedimented double dormers.

This was one of four houses (Nos. 125-131) speculatively built on lots owned by Alonzo Alwyn Alvord, a downtown hat merchant, as the area around Washington Square (converted from a potter’s field in 1826-28) was being developed as an elite residential enclave. Until at least the Civil War, No. 127 was inhabited by the families of prosperous downtown merchants and professionals, with the Rankin-Freeland family owning it between 1839 and 1901. In the later 19th century, as the neighborhood’s fashionable heyday waned, this house was no longer a single-family dwelling and became a lodging house.

In the 1910s, this block of MacDougal Street became a cultural and social center of bohemian Greenwich Village, which experienced a real estate boom in the 1920s. No. 127 was owned from 1920 to 1961 by Harold G. and Dorothy Donnell Calhoun, the former an assistant to the U.S. Attorney General; the Calhouns also owned Nos. 129 and 131. The lower portion of No. 127 was in commercial use by 1920. Alterations to the house included the creation of a roof “studio dormer” by linking its two dormers (pre-1920) and lowering the first-story windows as storefront windows (c. 1950s).