Biography | Elizabeth Blackwell — The Federal House at 58 Bleecker That Became a Hospital

People treat the first American woman doctor as a diploma on a Geneva wall. The hospital she actually ran is this house. 58 Bleecker Street, then numbered 64, stands at the corner of Crosby Street in what is now NoHo. James Roosevelt, great-grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, built the Federal-style house about 1822–23. The Blackwell sisters rented it after his widow left. On 12 May 1857 Elizabeth Blackwell, her sister Emily, and Marie Zakrzewska opened the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children here. The date was Florence Nightingale's thirty-seventh birthday. Henry Ward Beecher spoke at the opening. The ground floor held the dispensary, an examination room, and an operating room. Two wards sat on the second floor. The third floor was a maternity ward. Students, servants, and Zakrzewska slept in the attic. The staff was women. Patients who could not pay were treated free. Rebecca Cole, the second African American woman to take a U.S. medical degree, later worked here as a sanitary visitor, walking the tenements to teach hygiene. The house still stands inside the NoHo Historic District. Village Preservation put a plaque on it in 2018. The ground floor is now a restaurant. The pin is the building, not a later hospital that absorbed the infirmary's name. Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons