Rose Hill Historic House

Standing in the middle of a dense Manhattan block on East 29th Street, you will find a curious, white clapboard house that looks completely out of place among the surrounding brick and concrete. This structure is known as the Rose Hill Historic House, and its existence is a rare anomaly in a city where wooden homes were largely outlawed in the mid-nineteenth century to prevent fires. Its very presence here is a mystery, as preservationists have debated for decades whether it was an original outbuilding from a grand eighteenth-century estate that was moved to save it from the path of the encroaching street grid, or if it is a slightly younger structure built later on an oddly shaped parcel of land.