been of English descent, the traits of this house, dating back to 1799, show older Dutch
features. This view of house (above) shows its brick facade, added in 1836. Photo by
Justin Matthews.
By Justin Matthews
The Isaacs-Hendricks House at 77 Bedford Street, built in 1799, is the oldest house in the West Village, and one of the oldest structures in Manhattan.
A year after its construction the house was bought by Harmon Hendricks. Hendricks and his brother-in-law Simon Isaacs, New York agents of Paul Revere and laid the foundations for the copper-rolling industry in America. Around 1812, Isaac and Hendricks started a copper-rolling factory in Bellville, NJ, where they supplied cop-per boilers to a number of ships. The house has two stories and is mostly made of wood with a brick façade added in 1836.
Though the house dates from the time of the federal style of the late17-early 1800’s, based on the contemporary Georgian style of England (and its owners, and perhaps its builders, may have been of English rather than Dutch descent), it shows older traits, established in New York by the Dutch. The wide angle of the roof, as well as the bent tapering of its peak, suggest influence from the Dutch style of the earlier settlers, seen namely in farm houses and other rural structures surviving in the New York Hudson Valley and New Jersey. The bent peak of the roof (called a “Dutch gambrel” roof when the lower slope is steeper) is seen in many Hudson Valley houses by Dutch settlers and their descendants well into the late eighteenth century, but rare in the houses by the English in America. Among them: the John Teller house of Schenectady, NY of 1740; the Dutch Columbia County farm house of 1760, the Parsonage of Tappan, NY ca. 1770; and the Cornelius S. Muller House of Claverack, NY ca. 1767.
Coastal New York and the Hudson Valley did not have a large founding wave of English settlers (nor did its migrants tend to come from particular regions of Eng-land, as those of other colonies did). Generally rather, a gradual flow of migration came after the final British Acquisition of the Dutch colony in 1674 from all around England and nearby Anglo-American communities into the former New Netherland area, continuing well after the revolution. The traditions of building would mix after this time, as English and Anglo-American migrants merged with the Dutch. Old stylistic traits are most likely to survive, especially in the less grand vernacular works of carpenters and masons (of which this small and fairly simple house is likely one), more rooted in regional tradition and less influenced by new trends from outside—than of more cosmopolitan professional architects. The William Henry Ludlow house of Claverack provides another case of a hybrid house from the federal era, with a “gambrel roof ”.
Like the Dutch rural houses, the Isaacs Hendricks house was originally surrounded by open land, not built as a row house. It may preserve traits more common during a more rural phase, before the building boom starting in the 1820’s and 30’s, in the West Village.
The house retains two visible wood exterior walls but was given the red brick façade over its wall facing the street in 1836 to match the red brick more dominant in the federal style of later surrounding buildings.
