Twenty-three Washington Square North stands on the most storied block front in Greenwich Village. The houses along the north side of the park went up in the 1830s on land the city had leased to the Trustees of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a seamen’s charity whose rents, drawn from these blocks, kept retired sailors for generations. When the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Greenwich Village Historic District in 1969, it called this row the prototype, in this country, of the monumental Greek Revival rowhouse, and the most imposing block front of early nineteenth-century town houses in the city.
The house is roughly 27.25 feet wide and some 10,800 square feet, its Flemish-bond brick facade carried up four stories behind elongated French windows, a high stoop, and paneled double doors. Inside, parlor and top-floor ceilings rise to heights rarely found in a Manhattan townhouse, and a private terrace crowns the roof with an open view straight to the Empire State Building. It is configured today as seven apartments, a layout that could be returned to a single-family mansion.
The same family has held it for more than sixty years, and it is the first townhouse on Washington Square Park to come to market in a decade. Famous names cluster along this row, Edward Hopper at No. 3 and the James family at No. 18, but No. 23’s distinction is quieter and rarer: an intact Greek Revival mansion on the park, waiting for its next steward.
