106 Spring Street #3S

Spring Street runs through the densest stretch of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, and 106 Spring Street stands inside those lines on a lot that was cleared for it. The year before the building went up, six earlier houses on the block were demolished. In their place rose a six-story store-and-loft building, completed in 1896 to designs by Gilbert A. Schellenger. Broker copy dates it to 1900; the record puts it at 1896, and the correction matters because it places the building among Schellenger's prolific 1890s output. He was a New York architect of wide range, from tenements and factory lofts to the high-end apartment houses he built by the hundred on the Upper West Side.

The listing calls the facade landmarked cast iron. The honest version is narrower. The building is brick, terracotta and limestone, with cast iron framing only the ground-floor shop windows, the commercial detail that gives the district its name. It sits inside the Cast-Iron District without being a cast-iron building, which is its own kind of accuracy. What the store-and-loft form left behind is the thing that survives best: deep floor plates, tall windows, and the structural columns that carried the working floors. Those elements were never decorative. They were how the building held weight, and they are why the interior reads the way it does now.

Unit 3S is a one-bedroom, one-bath co-op loft of 2,300 square feet, which means the bedroom is almost beside the point. The floor is organized around a 40-foot-wide Great Room under 11-foot ceilings, with the original columns left standing and a full wall of east-facing windows set in oak frames. Morning light runs the width of the room. It is offered for rent at 11,750 dollars a month, available July 15, with the Saltiel Team of Douglas Elliman handling the listing. What the number rents is not a one-bedroom in the ordinary sense. It is a single great floor of a working loft building, kept whole, with one room set aside for sleeping.