$32,000 and an Urban Grid

Aaron Burr was arrested for treason in 1807 and acquitted, but his creditors had already taken the estate. They sold the mansion and its leasehold to John Jacob Astor for roughly $32,000 — a fur fortune buying a founder's collateral at a discount. Burr insisted for the rest of his life that the arrangement had been temporary. Astor saw nothing temporary about it.

What followed was one of the first large-scale real estate developments in Manhattan. In December 1820, Astor had the mansion rolled downhill on logs to the corner of Varick and Charlton, where it reopened as a public resort, then an opera house, then a saloon, before being demolished in 1849. He leveled the hill it had stood on and pushed the fill west, which is why the Hudson now sits several blocks further from this address than it did in Burr's day. Then he cut streets across the flattened ground and lined them with Federal-style row houses.

One of those houses, completed in 1826, was 15 Vandam Street. Most of its neighbors are still standing. In 1966 the block was designated part of the Charlton–King–Vandam Historic District, which holds one of the densest surviving concentrations of Federal-era architecture in New York City.