203 East 29th Street

You are standing before a survivor of a lost Manhattan. The wooden structure at two hundred three East Twenty-ninth Street is one of the very few surviving frame houses on the island. It sits awkwardly on the block, its orientation a direct consequence of the eighteen eleven city grid that sliced through the landscape and turned once-rural estates into urban streets. While researchers debate its exact birth date, the timber framing suggests it originated as a farmhouse for the expansive Rose Hill estate in the late eighteenth century.