Barbara Sloan, the operations manager at Manhattan Renovations, a general contractor representing GlobalServ, said the owner was planning an information session for neighbors “to discuss details surrounding potential asbestos abatement and demolition.” She declined to comment on what might replace the building.

In this era of rapid development, countless properties have succumbed to the wrecking ball, taking their pasts with them. Preservationists argue that the rush to build luxury housing is changing the fabric of some of the oldest corners of the city. “Every time you lose a building in the middle of one of these beautifully preserved blocks, it creates a missing tooth,” said Erik Bottcher, a member of the board of directors of the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative. “It just disrupts that special sense of place and time that we all love.”

The story of this Greek Revival building and its neighbors began in the mid-19th century when the area was known as the Dry Dock District. The enclave housed merchants and artisans toiling in the dry docks along the East River, which was then the city’s primary waterway and port.

The same stretch of East Seventh Street later became known as Political Row, home to judges, lawyers and politicians connected to Tammany Hall. “There was a saying in the city that if a young man wanted to go into politics and become successful he would first have to move to ‘Political Row,’ ” The New York Times reported in a May 1902 article about the block.

The buildings are certainly lovely. The co-op at 262 East Seventh Street, which shares its eastern wall with 264, is painted a light green with ivy scaling the brick facade. “Anyone who stumbles upon this row of houses on the easternmost end of Seventh Street is typically dumbstruck,” Mr. Berman said. “You’re not expecting to see this intact row of houses.”

Why do these buildings seem unexpected? For part of the answer, look to that 1902 article, which ran under the headline: “The Doom Near of Old ‘Political Row.’ ” The impending doom then came not from luxury condos, but from a “tenement invasion.” Most of the existing homes on the block were being torn down and replaced with six-story multifamily tenements to house a wave of immigrants arriving from Europe.

“What was once exclusively an American neighborhood became almost a foreign colony,” the newspaper reported. The article also said, “In a year’s time practically all that will be left to distinguish that famous block from the neighboring streets will be the weather-beaten elm tree.”