410 West 20th Street #3

The seven houses from 406 to 418 West 20th Street are known together as Cushman Row, and they account for one of the most complete Greek Revival streetscapes in Manhattan. The land came from Clement Clarke Moore, whose Chelsea estate named the neighborhood, and the houses came from his friend Don Alonzo Cushman, who built the row between 1839 and 1840.

When the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Chelsea Historic District on September 15, 1970, it singled the row out by name: the outstanding feature of the street, and one of the best preserved uniform rows of town houses in New York City, rivaled only by Washington Square North. Number 410 stands fourth among the seven.

The character is in the details Cushman repeated down the row. The facades are smooth red brick laid with thin mortar joints, the doors are framed by brownstone surrounds with sidelights and transoms, and each house sits behind a deep front garden set back roughly ten feet from the line of the street.

The ironwork carries the Greek Revival vocabulary in full: stoop and areaway rails worked in Greek key and palmette motifs, cast-iron laurel wreaths encircling the attic windows, and, at Nos. 416 and 418, pineapple-crowned newel posts that have survived at the ends of the row.

Residence 3 is a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath duplex, and the renovation kept the house in view rather than papering over it. Exposed brick runs through the rooms, a decorative fireplace anchors the living space, and custom built-ins and hardwood floors carry through both floors.

The eat-in kitchen is built around a marble island set beneath a chandelier. Upstairs, the bedrooms take the top floor under sloped ceilings that follow the original roofline, and a garden sits below.

Across the street is the General Theological Seminary, the walled campus and garden block that has held this part of Chelsea quiet since Moore set aside the land for it. The row looks onto that green, which is part of why the houses still read the way they did when they were new.

To take Residence 3 is to rent behind one of the most intact Greek Revival fronts in the city, inside a house from 1840, on a row the Landmarks Preservation Commission has protected for more than fifty years.

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