Day 764

Neville-Tysen house

February 1st, 2014



The plaque on the porch from the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission states that this house was built around 1770 and is "one of the few large Pre-Revolutionary War houses still standing in New York City", but a local historian who has researched the building says it was actually constructed in 1783. For a period in the 1800s, it served as a tavern called "The Old Stone Jug".

The guy who owned the house from 1995 until his death in 2011 worked as a guide at Historic Richmond Town, and he restored the house to the look and feel of an earlier era. His only sources of heat were a fireplace and a 19th-century kitchen stove, and he had an 18th-century reflector oven and a spider pan that he used on occasion to cook meals in his fireplace. The current owner was seriously injured when she fell through a rotting floorboard into an old cistern shortly after buying the place in 2012; I'm not sure how she's fared since then.


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