In a city with so much steel, brick, and brownstone, it’s hard to imagine that the streets of New York in its earliest days were mostly lined with modest wood houses, shops, and stables.

Some still survive today, particularly in Greenwich Village. But because wood structures posed a huge fire risk, city officials began regulating and then banning their construction—first below Canal Street in 1816, then south of 32nd Street in 1849.

Yet the ban didn’t extend to 86th Street until 1866, which is how the charming Italianate wood-frame house at 412 East 85th Street made it to the cityscape by 1861.

A single-family dwelling with three stories, clapboard shutters, a wood cornice, and a homey front porch, this wood-frame holdout tucked between two larger residences is a stunning example of the kind of houses once popular in New York City.

Its origins begin with a mystery, as it’s unclear who actually built it, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). Before the house appeared, Yorkville was sparsely populated, with a small number of full-time residents and many vast country estates for rich New Yorkers scattered through the bucolic landscape.

Thanks to a new railroad stop in 1834 on Park Avenue and 86th Street, and then the launching of streetcar lines on Second and Third Avenues in the 1850s—not to mention the elevated trains that appeared in the 1870s—Yorkville’s population began to surge.

Most likely, a carpenter-builder put up the house, along with other wood-frame houses, on farmland that had once belonged to a man named Yelles Hopper, according to the LPC. Hopper’s property centered around a point on the East River called Horn’s Hook, where Gracie Mansion stands today.

The first resident of the wood house was James R. Reed. Over the next 40 years the home went through at least three other owners, all of German heritage—which makes sense, as Yorkville was posed to replace the East Village as the city’s main German enclave, or Kleindeutschland.

Though Yorkville was booming, tragedy struck some of the residents living the wood house—like James and Agnes Coss. An 1870 New York Daily Herald obituary for their 5-month-old twin daughter, Margaret, announced the location of the funeral at 412 East 85th Street.

In 1878, the funeral for another child, 4-year-old James Justin Clair, would be held here. Both funerals are heartbreaking reminders of the devastatingly high mortality rate for children in the 19th century city.

Alterations were made in the 1890s, including an extension in the back and the conversion of the house into a three-family residence with a ground-floor commercial space, per the LPC. Yorkville by now was fully urbanized, a neighborhood of thousands of tenement-dwelling immigrants working in nearby factories and breweries.

By the early 1900s, the house sold to John Herbst, a marble manufacturer who made marble and granite headstones. Herbst ran his business from the house until the 1950s, displaying some of his creations in the house’s front yard, as the fourth photo (1930s) and fifth photo (1950s) show.

That fifth photo reveals another round of alterations, with the porch reduced to an entryway over the front door, the shutters removed, and shingles covering the facade.

A dermatologist owned it next; he rebuilt the wide, three-bay porch. After he vacated, the house fell into disrepair, per the LPC. New owners purchased it in 1996, devoting themselves to reconstructing the facade to reflect how it likely looked in 1861.

Twenty years after the new owners moved in, 412 East 85th Street earned landmark status. Understated and snugly tucked between its neighbor buildings, it’s a spectacular time machine to Manhattan’s more rural past and one of only six pre-Civil War wood houses currently gracing the side streets of Yorkville.

One of those wood houses is a two-story holdout at 450 East 78th Street. And to the south of Yorkville on East 58th Street are twin cottage-size wood houses, holding court in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge approach.

[Fourth photo: NYPL Digital Collections; fifth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]