120 East 19th Street (New York City, New York)

 townhouse, apartment building, Italianate style (architecture)

4-story (plus raised basement) Italianate residential building completed in 1853 as a townhouse. Its first owner was Amos F. Hatfield, president of the Pacific Insurance Company. The Hatfield family lived here until 1857, after which it was occupied by dry goods merchant Samuel T. Addison for one year, and then purchased by James Madison Plumb and his wife, the former Jeannette Frances Yale. It was sold again in 1869, and by the next year was being operated as an upscale boarding house run by Allen M. Hopkins. Around 1897 it became a private home again when it was purchased by Bernard C. Amend and his wife, Bertha. In 1911 Bernard Amend hired architect James Spence to install an elevator in the house, and a few years later it was again a high-end rooming house.

With World War I raging, No. 120 East 19th Street became the Red Cross House for Nurses in September 1918, with lecture rooms, writing rooms, reading rooms and sleeping quarters. At some point in the mid-1900s the stoop was removed, but it was restored in a renovation in 2000. There were now a duplex apartment in the basement and parlor levels, two apartments each on the second and third floors, and another duplex on the fourth and new penthouse level (unseen from the street).

The facade is clad in brownstone. A high stoop on the right leads up to the parlor-floor entrance with a tall but narrow black wooden door. Next to the stoop are two basement windows with iron grilles, behind a low wall and hedges. The two tall parlor-floor windows next to the entrance have decorative iron railings across their bases, and the parlor-floor windows and doorway, along with the three bays of single-windows on the upper floors, all have arched brownstone molded architrave surrounds. The windows grow shorter at each floor, and air-conditioning vents have been cut between the two eastern bays. The facade is crowned by a black wooden roof cornice with scrolled brackets and panels.

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