This article originally appeared in Bedford + Bowery.
Elizabeth McCormick and Julia Gross likely never met. But, as students at the “well known” St. Brigid’s Academy at 315 East 10th Street, they both made the same walk between Avenues A and B to a rowhouse nestled in the center of the block. They would have looked up and seen the same quatrefoils leaflets visible today on the molding of the rusty-brown parapet and around the front door. Perhaps, like wistful students all across the city, the girls stared dreamily out of one of the nearly dozen windows overlooking Tompkins Square Park, half-listening to lessons on Dutch immigration to the city or how the land the school stood on was once a farm that Petrus Stuyvesant, the director-general of the Dutch West India Company, had owned.
James Whitlock and Franklin Baylies first built the unassuming four-story rowhouse as a residence in 1848, but after almost no time under private ownership, a succession of schools, aid societies, cultural associations, and community programs operated from within its brick walls. Today, it is once again a residence, now with 12 apartments. However, for over a century, young women—girls, really—with direct connections to this property faced kidnapping, gaslighting, theft, rape, prostitution, and abuse, but in many cases also found the fortitude to fight back.
