Before Riverside Park, before Riverside Drive, before the sparsely populated Manhattan district known since the 18th century as Bloomingdale was urbanized into the Upper West Side, there was a lone modest house.

Perched on the edge of the Hudson River in the West 80s, the two-story, pitched-roof dwelling appears to have no neighbors. A back porch faces the tracks of the Hudson River Railroad and the expansive waterfront; a front entrance opens to hilly, rocky land.

Outside are some of the residents, presumably—an adult or older child, a young kid or two, and a flock of chickens.

The scenes in the above photo—taken in 1884, as well as the one below from 1875—look like they depict bucolic upstate New York rather than Gilded Age Gotham.

But this really is Manhattan, and the farmhouse-style dwelling likely dates to the earlier 19th century—when Bloomingdale was a collection of family estates and working farms on hundreds of acres and chickens, gardens, and a barn would fit in perfectly.

Who lived in this house, and what was life like here at a time when the hallmarks of urban development—townhouses, elevated trains, graded streets, thousands of new faces—were rapidly encroaching? Here’s what we can piece together.

In the late 19th century, this was the home of Luke Welsh. Known as a “sporting man,” Welsh was an Irish-born boxer who came to the city in 1863 as part of a group of six athletes nicknamed the “Irish giants,” as they were all over six feet tall (Welsh was six-foot-two, per the New York Times.)

Boxing was mostly illegal in 19th century New York unless the match took place at an athletic club. Newspapers describe Welsh and other “sporting celebrities” attending fights at downtown clubs or sparring in front of raucous crowds. One account at the Bowery Theatre in 1868 reported that Welsh’s opponent “danced around Luke like a cooper round a keg.”

Welsh moved on from boxing in the 1870s and became part of the Tammany Hall political machine. He held positions as a sergeant-at-arms as well as a messenger. What these titles mean isn’t clear. But he had status, and his salary as a messenger earned him $1,200 a year—a fine sum in an era when a laborer’s yearly wage could have been as low as $300.

Though he lived in the house with his wife and four kids, Welsh turned part of his home into a saloon, reported an 1879 article, and he also had a boathouse by the 1880s.

The yard was the site of popular clambakes “on the lawn for the judges and politicians, with the chef carefully adding a magnum of champagne to each ten-gallon copper pot of chowder,” wrote Peter Salwen in his 1989 book, Upper West Side Story.

Day-to-day life had a rural feel. Welsh’s son James later recalled “a long family tradition of the children and visiting cousins planting trees nearby…cherries, apples, peaches, and plums came from trees on the property,” stated Salwen. James also said that “a mess of fish” would “be caught before breakfast by the younger boys for the morning meal before going to school.” (Map above, Bloomingdale in 1870, without the park of Drive)

Meanwhile, Bloomingdale was in transition. The new Riverside Park began welcoming visitors in the 1870s; Riverside Drive, then called Riverside Avenue, opened in 1880. Bloomingdale’s farmhouses, estate houses, and many shack dwellings for poor New Yorkers pushed to the margins were being replaced by mansions and townhouses. (Below, in 1889)

How did these transformations affect Welsh? I wish I knew. When he died in 1903 at the age of 65, The Evening World noted that this boxer-turned-politico “died yesterday at his home, No. 1534 West 83rd Street, from a complication of diseases.”

There is no 1534 West 83rd Street. Could his home have had a made-up house number to satisfy the requirements of living in the urbanized city? A death notice in the New York Times gives his address as 153 West 83rd Street. This is a stable (now a garage), which doesn’t seem right for a man who served the Tammany regime and later took a position with the steamboat police.

If it hadn’t been demolished before his death, the modest wood and brick house almost certainly went down soon after. Just as the Upper West Side as we know it today was making its debut.

For more on the houses and histories of 18th and 19th century Riverside Drive, check out one of Ephemeral New York’s Riverside Drive Gilded Age walking tours. The next tour dates are Sunday, October 12 at 1 p.m. and Sunday, October 19 at 1 p.m. Click the link for more info and to sign on!

[Top image: MCNY, X2010.11.6192; second image: MCNY, X2010.11.3084; third image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: MCNY, X2010.11.3105B]