80 1/2 - 82 Jane Street

 apartment building, Italianate style (architecture), 1886_construction

5-story Italianate double residential building completed in 1886. Designed by M. Louis Ungerich, it has twin entrances with a unified facade of red brick. The two entranceways are capped by cornice slabs carried on brackets. This same motif is carried out in the design of the windows, except that the cornices rest on substantial lintels. The frames and lintels of the window project so that the windows appear to be more deeply recessed than they are. The building is capped by a deep, bracketed Italianate cornice with panels between the brackets.

An apartment in No. 82 was home of John J. Harvey, the pilot of a fireboat who was killed fighting a blaze in an ocean liner at Pier 42. A plaque misidentifies this as the William Bayard House, where Alexander Hamilton was taken to die on July 11, 1804 after his duel with Aaron Burr. The actual house was torn down many years ago, but it was somewhere around here.