Isaac T. Hooper House

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The grand three-story (plus attic and basement) Greek Revival
style rowhouse at No. 110 Second Avenue, in today’s East Village
neighborhood of Manhattan, is the only survivor of a row of four houses
that functioned as an enclave for the extended family of the very wealthy
wholesale grocery and commission merchant Ralph Mead (1789-1866).
Constructed c. 1837-38 by the Mead family, No. 110 -
was purchased in 1874 by the Women’s Prison Association, which
had been established in 1845 as the Female Department of the Prison
Association of New York by Isaac Tatem Hopper and his daughter,
Abigail Hopper Gibbons, noted Quaker abolitionists and leading
advocates of prison reform, and chartered in 1854 under the new name.
The Isaac T. Hopper Home, opened here in 1874, is considered the
world’s oldest halfway house for girls and women released from prison.
The Home’s original mission was to rehabilitate these women by providing short-term shelter, religious
counseling, domestic training in sewing and laundry work, and job placement. A rare extant house of the
period when this section of Second Avenue was one of the most elite addresses in Manhattan in the early 19th
century, it is also a fine example of a grand Greek Revival style rowhouse. The house is characterized by its
machine-pressed red brickwork laid in stretcher bond; high stoop and areaway with wrought-iron fence;
entrance with Italianate style paneled double doors and transom; long parlor-level windows and cast-iron
balcony; and denticulated cornice; and is made particularly distinctive by its brownstone portico with Ionic
fluted columns supporting an entablature. The Isaac T. Hopper Home, which has continuously served the
mission of the Women’s Prison Association here since 1874, is a rare surviving 19th-century institutional
presence in this ever-changing neighborhood.

(Source:www.gvshp.org/gvshp/resources/his)

East Village Eco-Culture Map
updated 11/2011 by NYU Tourism Maps