146 - 156 East 89th Street

You are standing before a row of six brick houses that look like they belong in a Victorian storybook rather than the middle of modern Manhattan. Built in eighteen eighty-six and eighteen eighty-seven, these Queen Anne style residences were designed by the firm Hubert, Pirsson and Company. The architects were forced to be incredibly creative with space because they were tasked with fitting ten houses into the available land. They ultimately built these homes just twelve feet wide, roughly half the size of a standard city lot, to maximize the footprint for developer William Rhinelander.