NYC’s Oldest Brick House

NYC’s Oldest Brick House. Edward Mooney House. , This is the city’s oldest surviving brick townhouse, built in 1785, shortly after the British evacuated New York and before George Washington became President of the new republic. Reflecting the emergence from English colony to new republic, its architecture contains elements of both pre-Revolutionary Georgian and the in-coming Federal style. A well-to-do breeder of racehorses, Edward Mooney was also a wholesale butcher, a trade associated with many of the area’s buildings., In the early 1900s, this was Barney Flynn’s Saloon, hangout of pugilists and base of operations for Chuck Connors, the strutting, self-described “White Mayor of Chinatown” whose slumming tours included staged-to-shock visits to roughneck bars and opium dens., It was Connors who got former Bowery newsboy Izzy Baline a singing waiter job at the Pelham Café at 12 Pell Street, where he wrote his first song and changed his name to Irving Berlin. He later wrote “White Christmas” and “God Bless America.”, - Mitchell Grubler, Landmarks Committee Chair, Bowery Alliance of Neighbors