21 Bleecker Street

Bleecker Street began as farmland. In 1808 Anthony Lispenard Bleecker deeded most of the land beneath the future street to the city, and by the 1830s the new blocks were, briefly, among New York's fashionable addresses. This house belongs to that first chapter: a Federal row house built around 1830 and altered later in the Italianate style, one of a small surviving run on the street's easternmost block.

The house's second act is the one the record kept. By 1883 the New York Times described this stretch as a row of houses of the lowest character, which is precisely why the wholesale druggist Charles N. Crittenton chose it. That April he opened the Florence Night Mission here, named for his daughter Florence, who had died of scarlet fever at age four the year before. It held gospel meetings nightly at midnight, sheltered women until they could go out and work for themselves, and grew into the National Florence Crittenton Mission, some seventy-six homes across the country by 1914. Tilework at the entry still spells out the name. A furrier and a run of artists came and went in between.

The designer Gabriel Yuri spent close to four years on it. A founder of New Operations Workshop who came out of Diller Scofidio and Renfro, he bought the apartment partially renovated, with new walls plastered over the 1830s brickwork and the floors half finished, and spent the years since peeling that back. Architectural Digest ran it in its Small Spaces series in July 2026.

The great room holds northern, southern and western exposures through oversized windows over the tree-lined street, under 11 foot beamed ceilings, on restored original wide-plank pine. Custom built-in bookcases run against the exposed brick, with a Maharam-upholstered banquette and mid-century lighting. The kitchen is a restrained palette, stainless steel cabinetry over richly stained butcher block. At the rear, away from the street, the bedroom looks onto the building's garden through two oversized windows and a Juliet balcony.

This is the quiet eastern end of Bleecker, between Lafayette Street and the Bowery, where the street's earliest architecture still stands. The run of Federal houses here holds some of the last Federal houses on the street, and the block sits inside the NoHo East Historic District, designated in 2003. NoHo, SoHo, Nolita and the East Village all converge within a few blocks of the door.