The yearly tax assessments from the early 1870's show that the building was enlarged, and that a rear building was added.
The front structure is divided into apartments; she and her husband, David, who died two years ago, used to occupy the rear building.
Intended for the courtyard it has become a whole show to kick off the Academy's programme to turn its rear building, in Burlington Gardens, into a regular space for international and contemporary art outside its own membership.
The 1900 census recorded two heads of household at 7 Leroy: Henry Kingsley, 49, a lamplighter, and Josephine Hutchinson, 44, a buttonhole maker; Hugh Mack, 48, a junkman, lived in the rear building.
EVENTUALLY the little rear building at 152 East 38th Street was cut off from the row house at No. 150, although the curving side wing still sticks into the garden of No. 150.
Ottmar Mayer, a 73-year-old pensioner who lived in the rear building, used to pay around €370 a month for his three-bedroom flat – now he was suddenly looking at over €1,200.
But checking the yearly lists of building permits in the department's records at the Municipal Archives pinpoints two applications from 1871, an alteration for the front building, raising it to four stories, and a new-building permit for an 18-foot-wide rear building, four stories high, for four families, leaving only a tiny, narrow court between front and rear structures.
He gutted the two buildings and joined them with a glass roof, creating a four-story atrium filled with bamboo, orchids and ivy, and added a vertigo-inducing glass bridge connecting his second-story bedroom at the front of the house with his dressing room in the rear building.
So it was that, at a recent dinner for benefactors of the Ashmolean, the guests were encouraged to split up into small groups: some went to view the destroyed rear building, others to hear curators present the latest acquisition emergency, put on white gloves and examine objects recently secured.
The 1880 census helpfully discriminates between the occupants of front and rear buildings, and the back structure had three families.
