History
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Lamartine Place Historic District consists of 12 remaining houses from a block-long row of Greek Revival brick homes developed in the mid-19th century by Cyrus Mason and William Torrey. Quaker abolitionists Abby Hopper Gibbons and James Sloane Gibbons lived at 18 and later 19 Lamartine Place, now 337 and 339 West 29th Street. Their home was a documented stop on the Underground Railroad, helping freedom-seeking slaves on their journey to Canada, and served as a meeting place for abolitionists before the Civil War. After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the house was vandalized, and during the Draft Riots of July 1863 it was ransacked and torched amid four days of looting, arson, and lynching in New York City. The Gibbons’ daughters escaped the mob by fleeing over the rooftops of adjoining houses to a carriage waiting below. The district survives as a rare extant physical reminder of this violent chapter in the city’s and nation’s history.
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New York, New York · United States
