242 West 14th Street

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5-story Italianate residential building originally completed in 1853 for Gabriel Winter. It had a 2-story cast-iron storefront added above the street-level basement in 1897 by architect Frederick Bayliss. A high stoop leads to the parlor floor entry. The two upper floors are clad in red brick, with segmental-arched windows and wide stone sills, shorter at the top floor. The building is topped by a black metal bracketed roof cornice with garlands in the fascia boards.

Around 1887 Mary M. Hungerford purchased the Winter house and leased it to The Arlington League, a social club organized several years earlier for men interested in the theater. The Arlington League had moved on by 1890 and No. 242 returned to use as a boarding house. Hungerford sold the house at auction in 1894 to Josephine A. Horandt. In 1897 she hired architect Frank Bayliss to renovate the lower floors for commercial purposes, including the installation of the 2-story storefront. While many domestic-to-commercial renovations of the time could be called slap-dash, Bayliss's cast iron storefront was striking--a hefty combination of shallow paneled pilasters, expansive windows, and handsome cornices, in black cast-iron.

In 1900 the architectural partnership of Newman & Duncan operated from the parlor floor, while Adolph Chobotsky ran a branch office of the Prudential Insurance Company downstairs. Artist Jerome Myers had recently moved into a studio on the top floor, becoming the first of a succession of artists to call No. 242 home. In 1912 the parlor floor level was shared by dentists Guy Campbell and Samuel L Good. A variety of small shops and businesses came and went over the succeeding years. The artistic tradition continued when, in 1958, Franz Kline moved in to a second floor room. He was a pioneer in Abstract Expressionism along with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and remained here until 1962. In the 1960's the store was home to Sansegundo furniture, and for more than a decade from around 1990 to 2004 motion picture buffs shopped at Jerry Ohlinger's Movie Material Store.

A renovation in 2014 resulted in four apartments--one per floor--above the basement store. The street-level basement is now occupied by North Village Wine & Liquor.

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