Seminary Row
Forthcoming · Chelsea · NYC
№428
West 20th Street Chelsea · New York
Architectural elevation drawing of 428 West 20th Street
  • House The J.E. Whitley House
  • Constructed 1857 · F.X. Mony, builder
  • Style Italianate
  • Elevation Four stories, English basement
  • District Chelsea Historic · NRHP

A private residence on Manhattan's most graceful block. The full listing will follow.

40.7450° N · 74.0042° W
An elevation, drawn to scale
An Elliman Listing
№ 428 West 20th Street — facade photograph
Plate I № 428 West 20th Street — the J.E. Whitley House, photographed in the autumn of 2025.
A Note from the Agent

One block, eighteen houses, two centuries of New York.

Between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, the 400 block of West 20th Street is widely considered the most graceful residential block in Manhattan. It contains the oldest house in Chelsea. The finest unbroken row of Greek Revival residences in New York City. The garden of the General Theological Seminary, donated in 1819 by the man who wrote 'Twas the night before Christmas.

Every house on this block was built under the same covenant — written by Clement Clarke Moore himself, requiring brick facades, a ten-foot setback from the curb, and no commerce of any kind. Nearly two hundred years later, the rule still holds.

A private residence at the heart of the row, freshly renovated by its current owners, will be offered for sale this spring. This site is a brief introduction to the block — and to the house. The listing will follow.

A Brief Survey

The block, house by house.

Walked from east to west, from Ninth Avenue to Tenth, the south side of the 400 block reads like a syllabus in American residential architecture — Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, and a handful of Italianate-inspired late additions, all built within the same Moore covenant, all looking north toward the Seminary garden.

Cushman Row today, Chelsea, Manhattan
TodayCushman Row, the seven Greek Revival residences at 406 — 418
Cushman Row, historical photograph
ThenThe same row, photographed in an earlier century
North · The General Theological Seminary & Garden · 1827
The Seminary Garden · Chelsea Square West 20th Street № 428 400 402 404 406 408 410 412 414 416 418 420 426 428 430 434 436 440 9th Avenue 10th Avenue
North — The Seminary Garden · 1827
  • 400 — 402Late-19th-century apartment houses, including the Donac (1897)
  • 404Oldest dwelling in Chelsea · 1829
  • 406 — 418Cushman Row · 1839 — 1840 · Greek Revival
  • 420 — 426Italianate infill · mid-19th century
  • № 428The Whitley House · 1857 · the forthcoming listing
  • 430 — 434Italianate row continuation
  • 436The Chelsea Mansion · 1835
  • 438 — 440Late additions at the Tenth Avenue end
South — eighteen residences, two hundred years
404
1829 — 1830 · Federal
The Walker House
The oldest dwelling in the Chelsea Historic District. A wood-frame house with a brick front, built for Hugh Walker on land leased from Clement Clarke Moore for forty dollars a year. Its plaque still names it the oldest in Chelsea.
406 — 418
1839 — 1840 · Greek Revival
Cushman Row
Seven red-brick townhouses built by Don Alonzo Cushman, a friend of Moore and a descendant of one of the first English settlers at Plymouth. Considered, with the houses on Washington Square North, the finest row of Greek Revival residences in the city.
The Subject
№ 428
1857 · Italianate
The J.E. Whitley House
A four-story brick Italianate residence, three bays wide above an English basement. Built by F.X. Mony and named for the Whitley family, who made it their home through the second half of the nineteenth century. The forthcoming listing.
436
1835 · Federal
The Chelsea Mansion
A twenty-five-foot-wide townhouse of more than ten thousand square feet, six stories above a garden, with eight fireplaces and a private south-facing terrace. Currently listed by Serhant at eight figures.
402
1897 · Romanesque
The Donac
A five-story apartment house bearing the initials "DONAC" — Don Alonzo Cushman — above its entry. In the late 1950s, the home of LeRoi and Hettie Jones, where Kerouac, Hubert Selby Jr., Frank O'Hara, and Ornette Coleman mingled at parties.
Across
1827 — 1902 · Neo-Gothic
The General Theological Seminary
The oldest seminary of the Episcopal Church, on land donated by Clement Clarke Moore in 1819. Its enclosed gardens — known as the Close — remain the largest privately held green space in the neighborhood, and the open view from every house on the row.
Carved pineapple detail, a Greek Revival symbol of welcome, from Cushman Row

"The block of West 20th Street in Chelsea between Ninth and Tenth Avenues is one of New York's most graceful."

ArchiTakes The Seminary Block of West 20th Street
Across the Street

The garden that anchors the row.

Donated by Clement Clarke Moore in 1819, the eight-acre Close of the General Theological Seminary has been the unbroken northern view from every house on the block for nearly two centuries — a privately held garden that, by accident of architecture, belongs to anyone who lives across the street.

The General Theological Seminary, architectural detail
The Seminary Close — interior garden view
The General Theological Seminary buildings

The General Theological Seminary, founded 1817 · the Close, designed by Charles C. Haight, 1883 — 1902

The Centerpiece

A brief life of № 428.

A four-story Italianate townhouse, completed in the late autumn of 1857, has hosted seven generations of New Yorkers. A summary of who has lived inside.

The story of 428 West 20th Street is not the story of a single owner, but of the people who have moved through its rooms since the year before the Civil War — a builder, a young family, a journalist, a Quaker theologian, a Prohibition-era restaurateur, and, most recently, two software engineers who restored it.

Each generation left something. Original stone fireplace surrounds. Window shutters. Built-in bookcases. Wide-plank floors. The 400-square-foot terrace overlooking the seminary garden. And, as of last year, a renovation that prepared the house for whatever the next chapter holds.

1857
The builder. The Italianate house at № 428 is completed by F.X. Mony. He never lives in it.
1858
The Ryders. James M. Ryder marries Mary Louisa Spaight and they make it their home. A son is born in February the following year.
1870
The Whitleys. J.E. Whitley, attorney, raises a family here. His son Jonas graduates and becomes a journalist for The New York World; his daughter Charlotte teaches at Grammar School № 56 on West 18th Street.
1894
St. Anna's Hall. The Quaker minister Sarah Smiley founds a women's theological library inside the house. By 1894, it holds two thousand volumes, many of them rare books she has sourced personally from Europe.
1921
The whiskey. Charles Mordaunt, a Ninth Avenue restaurateur, lives at № 428. He sells a single glass of whiskey to a man who turns out to be a Prohibition agent. The arrest follows.
2025
The present chapter. The current owners — a Google engineer and an Instagram engineer — complete a year-long renovation that preserves the house's original details while reconfiguring the floor for true north-south light.
Register Your Interest

For when the listing goes live.

Full photography, floor plans, and pricing will be released in the coming weeks. Be among the first to receive them.

Justin Belmont
Douglas Elliman Real Estate
justin@belmontx.com · 646.000.0000
Licensed Real Estate Salesperson · New York