222 East 61st Street

Twenty-foot-wide townhouse built in 1871, on a block cut from the Treadwell farm. The Treadwell family held this land undeveloped from 1815, and when it finally came up for building the blocks between East 61st and 62nd filled in fast, almost entirely between 1868 and 1875, in Italianate and Greek Revival.

On 13 December 1967 the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the whole of it the Treadwell Farm Historic District, one of the earliest in the city, only two years after the commission began designating anything at all. That date is the reason the street still reads the way it does: three and four storeys of brownstone, an unbroken cornice line, and no tower anywhere in the sightline.

Twenty feet of width is the number that matters in a townhouse, and it shows up immediately in the parlor floor, where 12 foot ceilings carry rooms wide enough to hold a proper stair and still leave the plan open front to back. Marble mantels sit in the front rooms, arched doors open to the rear, and the floors run pale oak throughout.

5,346 square feet, five bedrooms and four and a half baths. The kitchen opens to the family room with an island and seating at it. Baths are marble, one of them with a freestanding tub under a skylit ceiling, and a dressing room is fitted out in dark wood against the otherwise white plan.

Three outdoor spaces, which on a twenty-foot lot is the harder half of the listing to come by: a planted garden at the back with bluestone underfoot, and a terrace above it looking out across the low brick rooflines of the district. What the 1967 designation bought the house, in the end, is a view that cannot be built out.

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