Alexander Hamilton’s Manhattan home has come close to suffering a fate similar to that of its famed owner over the years.
But instead of getting killed off, the historic 1802 house is about to be nursed back to glorious health.
Few visit Hamilton Grange at its current location on Convent Avenue and 141st Street – and many New Yorkers are not even aware it exists.
But National Park Service officials say that will all change in June, when the 18-room home is removed from the location where it was cast aside in 1893 to make way for the street grid in Hamilton Heights.
Crews are preparing to lift the building up 45 feet so that it can be moved past the neighboring St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.
It will then be transported around the corner to the 141st Street side of St. Nicholas Park.
“The beauty is that it will still be on what was Hamilton’s land,” said Stephen Spaulding, chief of architectural preservation for the Park Service.
After conducting extensive research and a forensic investigation of the construction to determine the original layout and design of the home, Spaulding said the agency hopes to restore it to its former luster so it can become a museum and memorial in 2009.
Hamilton built the Grange – the first and only home he ever owned – after he had mostly retired from public life.
He designed it around the same time he was founding the New York Post, with the help of architect John McComb, Jr., the man behind City Hall.
Hamilton only enjoyed the home for two years. He slept there – or perhaps tossed and turned there – the night before he was killed in his duel with Aaron Burr.
When the home was given to the church as part of a deal in the 1890s, its porches, original front door and staircase were either removed or reconfigured.
The city granted an easement to the National Park Service to allow the house to be moved onto its parkland, in what Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe described as a complicated legal agreement that took years to hammer out.
“St. Nicholas Park has come a long way, but we are enthusiastic that the move of the house will bring a steady stream of visitors into a part of the park which is not all that heavily used,” he said.