The Hess Triangle

Look down at the sidewalk on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street. There is a small mosaic triangle embedded in the concrete. It reads: "Property of the Hess Estate which has never been dedicated for public purposes." It is five hundred square inches of pure spite.

In the early nineteen tens, New York City used eminent domain to demolish two hundred and fifty-three buildings to widen Seventh Avenue and expand the IRT subway. Among the properties seized was a five-storey apartment building owned by David Hess, a landlord from Philadelphia. His estate later discovered that the city had missed a tiny triangular sliver of the original plot — roughly twenty-seven and a half inches on each side.

The city asked the Hess family to donate the remnant to the public. They refused. On July twenty-seventh, nineteen twenty-two, they installed the mosaic as a permanent declaration that this fragment of sidewalk belonged to them and always would.

In nineteen thirty-eight, the estate sold the triangle to the adjacent Village Cigars store for a reported one thousand dollars. It was, at the time, the smallest piece of private property in New York City. You can still see it — most people step right over it.