Maintaining that community feeling in Downtown market.

Wells & Gay-Stribling - the Downtown arm of residential broker Stribling & Associates - marks an impressive milestone in 1994, one that places the Chelsea-based realtor in historic company.

Formally incorporated as James N. Wells & Sons after its namesake founder, wells & Gay this year celebrates its 175th anniversary as New York's oldest residential real estate firm. By extension, the 24-broker office, first established in 1819 in a storefront on Hudson Street, could have the longest operating history of any residential realtor in the U.S.

During 1994, the Wells firm, which still specializes in Downtown real estate sales, is marking its nearly two centuries of doing business in lower Manhattan with an exhibit of historic maps, photographs, personal correspondence and other documents now stored at its townhouse offices on West 23rd street. A major portion of the collection, including leases and deeds dating back to the 1820s, will be donated to one of New York City's historical archives later this Fall. Starting in June, Wells & Gay began hosting several anniversary events in Chelsea relating to the firm's longstanding connections to the community, including its ties to author Clement Clark Moore.

Wells & Gay is also being honored in 1994 by the 100 Year Association of New York, whose members represent New York City's oldest businesses and non-profit organizations. Only 50 out of 300 have endured for as long as the Wells agency.

James Monroe President

When Wells Set Up Shop

James Wells first set up shop as a real estate agent in 1819, operating out of a storefront on Hudson and Christopher Streets in Greenwich Village. At the time, James Monroe was settling into his first term as the nation's fifth President (1817-1825), while the American flag had only 22 stars. New York City, with a population of 152,000, had laid out its first grid plan only eight years earlier in 1811, and the area of what is now mid-Manhattan was still largely open farmland and country estates.

Wells, a carpenter and builder, had earlier erected a group of rowhouses on Hudson Street, as well as the St. Luke's Episcopal Church, also on Hudson. Over the next few years, foreseeing Manhattan's movement north out of the Village, he would go on to devise a plan for development of the Chelsea Farm, an enormous tract of open land overlooking the Hudson River owned by his friend, author Clement Clark Moore.

Moore's famous Christmas verse, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," was penned in 1822 in the manor house at Chelsea Farm, situated on a hill sloping toward the river between what is now 22nd and 23d Streets, west of 9th Avenue. Moore had been offered $40,000 to sell the farm in 1833, but turned instead to his friend Wells to manage the property for residential use.

By 1835, Wells had overseen the laying out of Chelsea's first street plan and moved his office onto the Moore property at 191 9th Ave., between 21st and 22nd Streets. Through the 1840s and 50s, he had a hand in seeing much of the neighborhood take shape, including development of two "suburban" colonies - London Terrace and Chelsea Cottages - Tudor-style rowhouses on West 23d and 24th Streets that served as a model for creation of the block-long landmark apartment complex of the same name built in 1930.

Wells died in 1860, with the firm passing for many years into the hands of his sons and later, his grandsons, who continued to manage the Moore estate, along with other property in Chelsea and lower Manhattan. Other principals came to manage the firm over the next century, most notably the Eady family, which took over in 1908 and operated the Wells business until the 1970s. A brokerage department was first added in 1909 and the agency moved to its current West 23d Street location in 1934, where it remains today in an 1849 townhouse (built by Clement Clark Moore) listed on the National Register of Historic Properties.

Stribling Expands Wells

Starting in 1989

In 1977, broker Paul Gay took over the Wells shop and added his name to the business, which he held until his death in 1987. Two years later, with only four brokers active during the recession, Wells & Gay was acquired by Elizabeth Stribling, a successful uptown broker whose Madison Avenue firm had become a prominent fixture on the Upper East Side during the 1980s.

Since taking the name Wells & Gay-Stribling, the firm has considerably expanded its base of business, in the process becoming one of New York's most comprehensive Downtown residential broker. There are now 24 brokers, with sales reaching well beyond the original Chelsea and Greenwich Village roots to cover Gramercy Park, Murray Hill, Union Square/Flatiron area, SoHo, TriBeCa and even the Financial District. The firm has sold scores of Downtown-area townhouses from MacDougal Alley to Sniffen Court and Gramercy Park South, while also dealing in loft, brownstone and large apartment sales, as well as the smaller units that make up the nooks and crannies of Village sidestreets.

"We knew when we purchased Wells & Gay that we were joining a firm with great historical roots in New York, one that in many ways was responsible for establishing the Downtown market," said Elizabeth Stribling, who has maintained the 23rd Street offices intact from the Wells era. That includes preserving the "James N. Wells & Sons" logo chiseled prominently into building's stone facade, as well as keeping the imposing brass teller's window just inside the front entrance, where merchants and tenants used to come to pay their monthly rents on properties managed by Wells for Clement Moore's estate.

Rosita Sarnoff, who joined Stribling as, managing director of the Wells & Gay office in 1993, reiterated the firm's commitment to what former owner Paul Gay often referred to as "the Downtown villages."

"The whole concept of |Downtown living' in New York is as much a way of life and an individual urban attitude as it is about real estate," Sarnoff explained. "It may not look the same as in Clement Moore's day, but the sense of community remains generally stronger throughout lower Manhattan than in most other parts of the city."

Sarnoff noted that the lack of high-rises and numbered street-gridding in parts of Downtown help contribute to the neighborhood identity, while many Downtown Apartments are blessed with sunlight views, stoops and even backyards, not to mention cobblestone streets still running through sections of SoHo and TriBeCa.

"Given the close ties this firm has to much of the original real estate in Chelsea and Greenwich Village, it's only natural that the brokers at Wells & Gay-Stribling feel especially proprietary about the neighborhoods in which we do business. As it says in our logo, |Our town is Downtown, since 1819.' We hope somewhere that James Wells is smiling."