323 East 18th Street

The parlor windows face south across East 18th Street, and the rooms behind the pocket doors look onto a paved garden of nearly 900 square feet under mature trees. Four floors over a basement, twenty feet wide and fifty deep.

The city's record dates the house to 1901 and carries the year without a name attached to it. The same 1901 sits on the whole run of identical twenty by fifty lots along this blockfront: 315, 325, 327, 333, 335, 339, 341, 343.

All of this was the Great Bouwerie, the farm Peter Stuyvesant held from the 1660s, running from Sixth Street up to 23rd and from Fourth Avenue east to Avenue C. In 1836 Peter Gerard Stuyvesant and his wife Helen Rutherfurd set four acres of it aside and sold them to the City of New York for five dollars.

The park was to be called Holland Square. It stayed an empty lot until Stuyvesant sued the City in 1839 to make it build the thing. The cast-iron fence went up in 1847, two fountains finished the landscape in 1850, and Stuyvesant Square opened a block south and an avenue west of this door.

Across the street stand 326, 328 and 330 East 18th Street, three brick Italianate houses set further back from the sidewalk than anything else here. Cornelia Stuyvesant Ten Broeck leased those three lots in March 1852 to five men in the building trades, the carpenters George W., Theodore F. and Charles E. Youngs, the stonecutter Henry Wilson and John Edwards, on a condition that they put up brick or stone houses of three stories or more. Two were finished that year and the third in 1853. Wilson lived at No. 326.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission made all three individual New York City landmarks in March 1973, and in the reports it recorded that the north side of the street, this side, once carried a row of the mid-1840s, of which only No. 313 still stands.

Restored ceiling medallions and crown moldings, original hardwood floors, six fireplaces. The parlor level is herringbone, with a pier mirror between the front windows and original pocket doors that close the dining room off the living room at the back.

The garden level is the working floor: a bulthaup kitchen open to a family room, polished concrete underfoot, exposed brick, beamed ceilings and a wall of sliding glass out to the garden. A guest suite, a powder room and a separate entrance sit on the same level.

The third floor holds three bedrooms around a central lounge with banquette seating and built-in shelving. One is a suite over the garden with a windowed bathroom; the other two share a blue-tile bathroom.

The top floor is given over to one bedroom: treetops at the windows, two walk-in closets, the laundry, and a skylit bathroom with a deep soaking tub, a steam rain shower, a trough vanity and heated floors. The large room beside it takes a sitting room, an office or a sixth bed. The air is zoned and controlled floor by floor, and the basement adds 1,091 square feet for storage.