THE GRENZEBACH HOUSE The house of John Nicholas Grenzebach (1754-1838) stood at the northwest corner of Third Avenue and East 75th Street from the first decade of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth. When the substantial frame dwelling was built on the old Eastern Post Road, it was located in a region of scattered country houses, of pleasant gardens and farms. During the course of years, it witnessed the opening of streets, the building of the Harlem Railroad up Fourth Avenue in the early 1830's, the growth of the Yorkville settlement near-by, the advance of the Third Avenue Elevated in the 1870's, and the construction of rows and rows of brick and stone buildings throughout its neighborhood. The New York Historical Society owns two copies of a rare little lithograph made of the house in 1862, when it was still surrounded with lawns and trees, and had not yet been hemmed in on all sides with brick buildings. This lithograph is reproduced on page 78, and may be compared with a similar view on page 80, from the colored lithograph in Valentine's Manual of the Common Council for 1866. The house was built for John Nicholas Grenzebach, who was born in Hesse-Cassel, Germany, in 1754. He came to New York City a few years after the close of the American Revolution. He was a slim, handsome young man, six feet tall, and must have looked very well indeed when he later became a Lieutenant in the Corps of Artillery, and wore the blue and red uniform which is still preserved by his descendants. About 1789 (the year of Washington's inauguration as first President of the infant United States), Mr. Grenzebach established a grocery business at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, just west of Federal Hall where Washington took his oath of office, and where the Congress assembled. Two years later, on September 21, 1791, he was married by the Rev. Dr. John Daniel Gros to Margaret Dean, then in her twentieth year. Her father, Richard Dean, had died when she was very young, and her mother, Susannah Dean, had become, in 1774, the wife of Casper Samler, of New York. Mr. Samler always treated his step-daughter as his own child, and when he died in 1810, she was included in his will. 75