Tenth Street Studio Building

You are standing near the former site of the Tenth Street Studio Building, a structure that fundamentally altered the professional landscape for American artists. Before its construction in 1857, painters often toiled in cramped, poorly lit boarding house rooms. Real estate developer James Boorman Johnston changed this by commissioning the young architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a dedicated space for creative work. Hunt, the first American to study at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, created a building centered around a communal gallery with a massive glass-domed skylight, providing artists with the steady, natural light they desperately needed.