The Hopper-Gibbons House at 339 West 29th Street was built in 1846-47, and is one of the last extant documented Underground Railroad site in Manhattan. Abigail Hopper Gibbons (1801-1893) and James Sloan Gibbons (1810-1892) purchased the house in 1852.
James was a cousin of Horace Greeley and the writer of the lyrics to the Civil War call to arms, “Three Hundred Thousand More.” A financial editor for the New York Evening Post he later served briefly as an editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard. Abigail was the daughter of noted abolitionist and prison reform advocate Isaac Hooper (1771-1852; his home still stands in the East Village), who directly confronted slave kidnappers.
Both James and Abigail were Quakers and their home was a prominent site of abolitionist advocacy. In 1841, the Quaker New York Monthly Meeting, which was dominated by Hicksite Quakers, disowned Abigail’s father and her husband James for their writing and other activities against slavery.
The following year Abigail resigned from the Meeting in protest, also removing her and James’ four minor children. She and her family maintained Quaker practices and faith but did not rejoin the Meeting.
Abigail worked with well-known abolitionists of her time, including Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Moore Grimké, William Lloyd Garrison, and Theodore Dwight Weld. Hopper joined the Manhattan Anti-Slavery Society in 1841, which was then a predominately African-American organization in membership. It protested all-white memberships of other abolition societies, including the Ladies’ New York City Anti-Slavery Society.
During the Civil War Abigail worked closely escaped slaves who sought refuge behind United States Army lines and also helped to establish two field hospitals in Virginia.
The house was targeted during the 1863 Draft Riots which were characterized by deadly violence against Black New Yorkers, Black institutions, and abolitionist sites.
On July 14th, 1863, the house was ransacked and set on fire. Members of the family were able to escape across the building’s roof to safety.
After the Civil War, Abigail Gibbons founded the Labor and Aid Society in New York, which helped returning veterans find work; The Isaac T. Hopper Home, which assisted former women prisoners to integrate into society after their release; the New York Diet Kitchen, which served infants, the elderly and the poor; and was a co-founder and president of the New York Committee for the Prevention and Regulation of Vice, which worked to control prostitution, drinking and gambling.
Abigail died in 1893 at the age of 91; a year after James. They are buried in the Hopper family plot in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn along with two formerly enslaved people.
Preservation of Hopper-Gibbons House
In 2009, after the building became part of the Lamartine Place Historic District, its owners built a rooftop addition without permits, which was declared illegal by both the New York City Department of Buildings and the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division. Despite these rulings, the owners came before Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) in 2016 seeking a Certificate of Appropriateness for the illegal addition.
That’s when advocates turned to Michael Hiller, who handles the lion’s share of preservation law on behalf of preservationists in New York City. Hiller knew that he had to convince LPC that a rooftop addition would never be appropriate at this site, because the roof of 339 West 29th street was integral to the building’s role as part of the Underground Railroad, and its experience during the Draft Riots.
Hiller reached out to Civil Rights hero John Lewis who represented Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, providing documentation that two enslaved people who had stopped at the Hopper-Gibbons house on their way to freedom had come from the area now comprising Georgia’s 5th District.
Lewis’s office brought the case to the attention of the New York Members of Congressional Black Caucus. As Hiller told the publication SuperLawyers, “The Congressional Black Caucus sent correspondence on our behalf. All of a sudden the state assembly, state senator, some counsel, everyone galvanized behind our cause. In the end, not only did we win in 2017, it was a unanimous rejection of the plan, and it never came back.”
Today, the addition is gone, and the rooftop is intact, a tangible link to New York’s Underground Railroad and abolitionist history.
Illustrations, from above: Hopper-Gibbons House, second from left, covered in ivy in the ca. 1920s (NYPL); Detail, James Gardner photo taken May 20, 1864 in Fredericksburg showing Abby Hopper Gibbons seated in the doorway (Library of Congress); and Hopper-Gibbons’s House under illegal construction in circa 2009.
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