13 Vandam Street

Construction began in 1829 on a pair of nearly identical rowhouses at 11 and 13 Vandam Street, completed the following spring. Each was twenty five feet wide, with a peaked roof punctured by two dormers, and a brick tea room out back finished, per the record, in the most costly manner, with sliding doors and Egyptian marble mantels.

Around the Civil War, the roofline changed. The attic at 13 Vandam was raised into a full third floor, and a modern Italianate cornice replaced the old peaked one, the house updating itself the way houses on this street tended to.

William Oland Bourne, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1819, was a minister, poet, and the author of children's books including Little Silverstring and Goldenlink. He married Adelia Ella Martin, whose father held the lease on the house, and the couple settled in at 13 Vandam.

During the Civil War, Bourne served as chaplain of the hospital in Central Park and edited a newspaper called The Soldier's Friend. In 1865 and 1866, from this house, he sponsored a writing contest open only to Union soldiers and sailors who had lost their right arm in the war, with prizes running as high as one thousand dollars for the best essay composed left handed.

A fire chief lived here in the early 1880s. In the 1920s the house had a stranger connection, to a filmmaker tied up in a Paris murder investigation who later made his name documenting dangerous expeditions on film.

By the 1960s, Hugh and Marguerite Stix ran a shell jewelry gallery out of the house, and Marguerite's shell jewelry found its way onto women like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

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