Before Riverside Park, before Riverside Drive, before the sparsely populated Manhattan district known since the 18th century as Bloomingdale was urbanized into the Upper West Side, there was a lone modest house.
Perched on the edge of the Hudson River in the West 80s, the two-story, pitched-roof dwelling appears to have no neighbors. A back porch faces the tracks of the Hudson River Railroad and the expansive waterfront; a front entrance opens to hilly, rocky land.
Outside are some of the residents, presumably—an adult or older child, a young kid or two, and a flock of chickens.
The scenes in the above photo—taken in 1884, as well as the one below from 1875—look like they depict bucolic upstate New York rather than Gilded Age Gotham.
But this really is Manhattan, and the farmhouse-style dwelling likely dates to the earlier 19th century—when Bloomingdale was a collection of family estates and working farms on hundreds of acres and chickens, gardens, and a barn would fit in perfectly.
Who lived in this house, and what was life like here at a time when the hallmarks of urban development—townhouses, elevated trains, graded streets, thousands of new faces—were rapidly encroaching? Here’s what we can piece together.
In the late 19th century, this was the home of Luke Welsh. Known as a “sporting man,” Welsh was an Irish-born boxer who came to the city in 1863 as part of a group of six athletes nicknamed the “Irish giants,” as they were all over six feet tall (Welsh was six-foot-two, per the New York Times.)
Boxing was mostly illegal in 19th century New York unless the match took place at an athletic club. Newspapers describe Welsh and other “sporting celebrities” attending fights at downtown clubs or sparring in front of raucous crowds. One account at the Bowery Theatre in 1868 reported that Welsh’s opponent “danced around Luke like a cooper round a keg.”
Source: A ghostly old house on the edge of the Hudson River, and the boxer who lived there with his family
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