The architectural history of Manhattan’s Fraunces Tavern dates back to 1719, when merchant Étienne “Stephen” De Lancey (1663-1741) applied to the city of New York’s Common Council for, and was granted, an additional three and a half feet on his plot of land so he could build “a large brick house,” which he then proceeded to have constructed at 54 Pearl Street.
Samuel Fraunces (1721/22-1795) purchased this building in 1762 and years later, in advertisements for its sale, described it as three stories high with a tile and lead roof. After Samuel Fraunces’s time, the building was damaged, but not destroyed, by several fires beginning in 1832.
Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York purchased the building in 1904.
[It’s notable the the man who had the building constructed and the tavern’s namesake, were both immigrants: DeLancey was born in France; Fraunces, who for many years was thought to have been Black or of mixed-heritage, in the West Indies.]
They hired early historic preservation architect William H. Mersereau to complete an extensive and extremely sensitive restoration, reopening the building as a museum and restaurant in 1907.
Mersereau preserved and stabilized the original architectural elements and materials from 1719 while removing elements that had been added since Samuel Fraunces’s time.
Beginning in 2021, Fraunces Tavern Museum commissioned the most comprehensive and detailed onsite professional examination and analysis ever conducted on the structure.
The report of this examination and analysis revealed that considerably more of the original fabric and materials remain in the structure than was previously believed to be the case.
Mersereau identified and restored the original roof line after the plaster was stripped from the building’s south wall. He observed that the bricks above the original line were entirely different in measurement from the bricks below the line.
Original masonry on the building’s façade that survives from the 1719 structure includes large sections of the yellow Dutch bricks and three red-brick jack arches on the second floor of the building’s Broad Street side.
The façade of yellow Dutch bricks is the sole surviving such exterior in all of New York City from a time when much of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century New Amsterdam was constructed with this material.
Large sections of the red brick used on the Pearl Street façade are also original and represent one of the first documented and oldest surviving uses of the red English brick in New York City.
The second-floor Long Room remains in its original location with its ceiling and walls still intact. Original beams of the structure may be observed in various exposed areas of the basement, and it is very clear that a tremendous amount of original material remains in situ hidden behind the interior walls of the building.
In undertaking this restoration with an eye to keeping as much historic fabric as possible, William H. Mersereau anticipated the historic preservation movement by several decades.
In the Museum’s collection, there are many materials saved by Mersereau, including wood fragments, dust, and paint samples.
His personal letters in the Museum’s archives outline his sensitive approach to the building’s restoration and suggests he was a pioneer in this preservation movement.
You can read more about William H. Mersereau’s preservation philosophy and the restoration of Fraunces Tavern here.
Read more about historic preservation in New York State.
A version of this essay by Noah Duell, Senior Development Officer at Fraunces’s Tavern Museum, was first published on the Museum’s website. Fraunces Tavern Museum’s mission is to preserve and interpret the history of the American Revolutionary era through public education. Visit their website for more information.
Illustrations, from above, courtesy Fraunces Tavern Museum: Fraunces Tavern today, showing the surviving yellow Dutch brick of the Broad Street facade; the tavern’s Broad Street facade during the Mersereau restoration, ca. 1905; the original roof line documented by Mersereau, ca. 1905; and the tavern’s Broad Street facade during restoration, ca. 1905.
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