Chimney Sweep in Noho, NY

In 1748, Jacob Sperry, a physician from Switzerland, created the city’s first botanical garden near the current intersection of Lafayette Street and Astor Place. At the time, it was located about 1 mile (1.6 km) north of the developed portion of the city and served as a vacation stop for people from present-day downtown. By 1804, John Jacob Astor bought the site from Sperry and leased it to Joseph Delacroix. Delacroix built a country resort named Vauxhall Gardens on the site; the gardens had previously been located further downtown, in Tribeca.

NoHo soon became an enclave for well-to-do families. Because of rapid development on Bond, Bleecker, and Great Jones Streets, it was not affordable to build houses on these streets. These streets were among the city’s most elite at the time, and contained such personalities as “aristocratic” mayor Philip Hone. Therefore, in 1826, after Delacroix’s lease expired, Astor carved out an upper-class neighborhood from the site with Lafayette Street bisecting eastern gardens from western homes. The street was christened by the Marquis de Lafayette in July 1825.

Wealthy New Yorkers, including Astor and other members of the family, built mansions along this central thoroughfare. Astor built the Astor Library in the eastern portion of the neighborhood as a donation to the city. Alexander Jackson Davis designed eye-catching row houses called LaGrange Terrace (now Colonnade Row) for speculative builder Seth Geer. Geer built the houses for the development in 1833. The area became a fashionable, upper-class residential district, and when Lafayette Street was opened in the 1820s, it quickly became one of the most fashionable streets in New York. This location made the Gardens accessible to the residents of nearby Broadway and the Bowery. The houses once contained such notable residents as the Astor family and the Vanderbilt family, in addition to authors Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray; U.S. President John Tyler was married in these houses.