Colonnade Row

Take in the glorious yet deeply faded grandeur you see before you! Yes, those marble columns are wrapped in protective wire mesh to protect them from further disintegration (and yes, that marble was quarried initially by prisoners at Sing Sing), but this was once the most illustrious address in New York.

Really? You ask. Yes! This is, after all, “Astor Place,” named for John Jacob Astor, the fur trader/real estate mogul/richest man in America. He lived at 434 Lafayette Street here on Colonnade Row.

Astor swept in and bought this area in 1804. By 1806, he leased the land to Joseph Delacroix, owner of “Vauxhall Gardens,” the premier pleasure garden/amusement promenade in New York. The gardens offered everything from vaudeville to balloon races to fireworks.

When Delacroix’s lease was up in 1826, Astor nixed the garden and hit the road… well, he built a road: “Lafayette Place” (today’s Lafayette Street.) It was named after the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution who made a triumphant return to New York in 1824.

On Lafayette Place, Astor built “Lagrange Terrace,” now known as “Colonnade Row.” The original name was a reference to Lafayette’s summer home in France. And the row certainly had a certain je ne sais quoi…

The original row of nine townhouses (four still stand today) was completed in 1833. They were some of the first buildings in New York City to boast indoor plumbing and both hot and cold water!

They were home to the cream of New York Society, including Astor himself, the Vanderbilts, and even the writer, Washington Irving. President John Tyler even hosted his wedding reception there, as his First Lady had grown up on Colonnade Row!

But fashion is fickle; by the 1860s, New York Society had moved uptown. Colonnade row began to lie dormant. By the 1960s, Colonnade Row’s fortunes changed once more. The “grand old row,” now not so grand but certainly very old, became an artist’s haven. And Astor’s old home got itself an off-broadway theater!

“Astor Place Playhouse” opened in 1963 and became the “Astor Place Theater” in 1965. The Astor Place Theater has exclusively run “Blue Man Group” since 1991.