17 West 16th Street House

History and architecture

This handsome Greek Revival house, built about 1846 in the once fashionable Union Square neighborhood, is one of a row of nine townhouses, four of which survive. The houses were planned and probably built by Edward S. Mesier. No. 17 later housed the famed birth control clinic of Margaret Sanger, the pioneer of family planning in this country.

The site of No. 17 lies within the original boundaries of a farm which belonged to Simon Congo, a free black man and property owner in 17th-century New York. This parcel of property was later incorporated into the holdings of the highly esteemed landowner Henry Brevoort of the Bowery, a civic leader of New York in his day. The northernmost tract of the Brevoort farm was sold to Thomas and Samuel Burling in 1799 and soon thereafter a section of land (now roughly bounded by Fifth and Sixth Avenues and. West 16th and 17th Streets) was purchased by John Cowman from them. This land remained rural up into the 1830s, despite the fact that Fifth and Sixth Avenues were opened to traffic in this area a decade earlier.

"Union Place," later Union Square, one block to the east appears on the New York City Commissioners Map'of 1808-1811. It was formed by the unplanned convergence of the Bowery Road (Fourth Avenue), Bloomingdale Road (Broadway), and the wide cross-town artery, 14th Street. The site was at times used as a Potters Field, and as late as 1833 was covered with crude shanties. The new Union Square was an integral part of the city plan to improve the vehicular traffic patterns while providing the amenities of a formal park within the expanding city.

After the square was cleared, graded, and paved it was formally opened to the public on July 19, 1839. A handsome row of swell-front townhouses lined the east side of the square above East 15th Street. The city's rapid urban expansion northward made the Union Square area, then bordering on the city's very limits, a promising section for residential development. By 1839 blocks of fine houses were being built north of 14th Street. These were soon followed by graceful mansions and townhouses constructed for the well-to-do of the City.

It was during this favorable period for residential development that Edward S. Mesier purchased much of the land owned by John Cowman in 1842. This property was previously linked by Burling Lane to a section of the Bowery Road, which had been incorporated into Union Square. Messer planned to make West 16th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues a first-class residential street. Most of the lots were laid out with twenty-five foot frontages on both sides of the street.

The nine lots on the north side closest to the corner house on Fifth Avenue, however, were to be "thirty-three and one third feet wide" with setbacks of "six feet from the street line...with a swell...to extend two feet six inches nearer to the line of the street..." No. 17, one of these nine swell-front houses which were erected in about 1846, was purchased by George S. Fox in April of that year.

The house continued to serve as a private residence for many years and was owned by a series of families.