In the fall of 1833, the Institution's Board of Managers took a ten-year lease on property in a section of Manhattan called Strawberry Hill, a site that ran between Eight and Eleventh Avenues and Twenty-ninth and Thirty-ninth Streets. A large house of Sing Sing marble, buttressed and turreted, offered ample living space in a section deemed "one of the most pleasantest situation on Manhattan". The city had not yet opened and paved the streets, the property lacked city water and sewers, and gas lines came later.