485 West 22nd Street

The tax records say circa 1900. The Landmarks record says otherwise. When the city extended the Chelsea Historic District in 1981, the designation report documented Nos. 477 through 491 West 22nd Street as a row of eight Anglo Italianate brick and brownstone houses, "all built alike as one project" in 1856. The builder was Morgan Pindar, whom the report calls the most active builder and developer of the area at the time.

Pindar bought the eight lots directly from Clement Clarke Moore in July 1855, carving them from the estate that gave Chelsea its name. Moore's deed came with his customary covenants: fronts of brick or stone with brown cut stone trimmings, quality "not to be inferior to" the house then rising for William B. Dixon down the block at No. 473, and an eight foot front court setback that still gives West 22nd Street its green dooryards. Chelsea's uniform streetscape was contract law a century before landmarks law.

Pindar's timing was nineteenth century flipping at its purest. He sold all eight finished houses within two years, for more than four times what the land had cost him, and then the Panic of 1857 ruined him, his property ordered sold to settle debts. The row he left behind has outlasted the fortune.

The eight houses were designed to read as one building: rusticated brownstone English basements with round arched door and window openings, three upper floors of pressed brick, and a single Italianate bracketed cornice held dead level even as the street falls toward Tenth Avenue. The stoops absorb the slope instead, growing from four steps at No. 477 to seven at No. 491.

No. 485 has kept more than most. The designation report notes that its upper floors are almost intact, including the original cornice, along with two over two sashes, pressed metal lintels, arched basement openings, and the original cast iron scoop railings at the stoop. The row once turned the corner too: its westernmost house came down in 1928, and the Art Deco Empire Diner has stood on that site since 1929.

Today the house works as a four family townhouse, three full floor apartments stacked above a two bedroom garden duplex, about 4,000 square feet in all with five bedrooms and five baths. The listing describes gut renovations of the three floor-throughs, substantial capital improvements throughout, and a roof deck up top.

The configuration frames the classic West Chelsea decision: hold the floor-throughs as income, or work back toward the single house underneath, a path the listing points to as conversion potential. A contract was signed at the end of June through Leslie J. Garfield.

The house faces Clement Clarke Moore Park, named for the man who sold Pindar the ground it stands on. Moore, of the Chelsea estate, is popularly credited with writing "A Visit from St. Nicholas," though some scholars contest the attribution. Either way, the view across the street belongs to the family that laid out the neighborhood.

The High Line runs one block away, and the row registers from that side too: a 2007 Community Board 4 letter praised these houses' intact rear walls as "a significant visual resource" in the district. Between the park, the elevated rail, and the Empire Diner anchoring the corner, this stretch of West 22nd Street may be the most complete short walk in Chelsea, and the 1856 row is the reason the block still reads as Moore intended.

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