An elegy for a row of pre-Civil War wood cottages eclipsed and then erased by Gilded Age Fifth Avenue

They look like the kind of unassuming houses built across Manhattan just before the Civil War, and a newspaper ad offering the lots for sale in 1851 lends support to that possibility. Built at today’s northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 81st Street, these five attached cottages likely housed working-class families. Three were united under one cornice, and most featured shutters that must have looked quite pretty in the row’s early years. The wood-frame building material tells us that the city’s ban on wood structures—they were fire hazards, of course—had yet to extend to the East 80s. It finally did expand in 1866, prohibiting wood construction south of 86th Street. Into the 1870s, this stretch of Fifth Avenue was more like a country road. Traffic consisted of drovers bringing cattle to market. Lamplighters came by every night to light the oil lamps that served as street lights—which typically blew out on windy days. Where were the neighbors? Before the heyday of the Gilded Age, they…