The mystery of the First Avenue tenement that had its top four floors sheared off

The first things I noticed about 2029 First Avenue were the decorative lintels above the second floor windows. Attractively styled for window lintels on upper First Avenue, I figured this stubby holdout wedged beside two brick buildings between East 104th and 105th Streets must have been a former stable. I imagined that those roll-down window gates had once been two stable doors used by the drivers of the horses as they plied the streets of what used to be Italian East Harlem in the early 20th century. A look at the photo archives showed me something very different. A 1940 tax photo from the NYC Department of Records & Information Services revealed that this two-story stub had actually been a six-story tenement. You can identify it in the center of the 1940 photo by those decorative window lintels—which stretch across into a second twin tenement at 2031 First Avenue. When I spotted the building I thought was a former stable, I hadn’t noticed that the tenement next door had the same…