120 and 122 East 92nd Street

These two wooden houses at one hundred twenty and one hundred twenty-two East Ninety-second Street are rare survivors from a time when this part of Manhattan was semi-rural countryside. Built in eighteen fifty-nine and eighteen seventy-one, they predated the citywide ban on wood-frame construction that was eventually enacted to prevent massive fire outbreaks. While the surrounding neighborhood transformed into an urban landscape of stone and brick mansions, these structures remained remarkably untouched, serving as an architectural bridge to the mid-nineteenth century.