Ralph and Ann E. Van Wyck Mead House (later Isaac T. Hopper Home of the Women’s Prison Association)

History and architecture

The grand three-story (plus attic and basement) Greek Revival style rowhouse at No. 110 Second Avenue, in today’s East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, is the only survivor of a row of four houses that functioned as an enclave for the extended family of the very wealthy wholesale grocery and commission merchant Ralph Mead (1789-1866). Constructed c. 1837-38 by the Mead family, No. 110 was the home in 1839-44 of merchant/ship broker David H. Robertson.

After Robertson declared bankruptcy, this property was foreclosed and auctioned in 1844, and transferred to Ralph Mead. The proprietor of Ralph Mead & Co. (established 1815), Mead and his second wife, née Ann Eliza Van Wyck, resided here from 1845 until 1857. The house was leased after 1858 and remained in Mead family ownership until 1870. It was sold to railroad agent George H. Ellery and his wife, Cornelia, who resided here c. 1872¬ 74. It was purchased in 1874 by the Women’s Prison Association, which had been established in 1845 as the Female Department of the Prison Association of New York by Isaac Tatem Hopper and his daughter, Abigail Hopper Gibbons, noted Quaker abolitionists and leading advocates of prison reform, and chartered in 1854 under the new name.

The Isaac T. Hopper Home, opened here in 1874, is considered the world’s oldest halfway house for girls and women released from prison. The Home’s original mission was to rehabilitate these women by providing short-term shelter, religious counseling, domestic training in sewing and laundry work, and job placement. A rare extant house of the period when this section of Second Avenue was one of the most elite addresses in Manhattan in the early 19th century, it is also a fine example of a grand Greek Revival style rowhouse.

The house is characterized by its machine-pressed red brickwork laid in stretcher bond; high stoop and areaway with wrought-iron fence; entrance with Italianate style paneled double doors and transom; long parlor-level windows and cast-iron balcony; and denticulated cornice; and is made particularly distinctive by its brownstone portico with Ionic fluted columns supporting an entablature. The Isaac T. Hopper Home, which has continuously served the mission of the Women’s Prison Association here since 1874, is a rare surviving 19th-century institutional presence in this ever-changing neighborhood.