112 Prince Street #5

112 Prince Street stands on the corner of Greene, a six-story Neo-Grec loft building of cast iron completed in August 1889. The architect was Richard Berger, who drew it for L. Sachs and Brother, fur importers, in a stretch of Soho then given over to dry goods and the wholesale trade. The fur business did not hold the address for long. By 1913 James Thompson and Company was running textile manufacturing inside, one of the cloth concerns that filled these floors when the neighborhood made and shipped rather than lived. The cast-iron front is Berger's, and the building wears its commercial century plainly.

What sets the building apart is not on its facade but on its flank. In 1975 the artist Richard Haas painted a five-story trompe l'oeil mural across the blank east wall, mimicking Berger's cast iron column for column, with two real windows worked into the illusion and two cats painted at the glass. It was Haas's first outdoor work, commissioned by Doris Freedman through City Walls and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Ada Louise Huxtable praised it in The New York Times. The wall reads as a second building, painted onto the first, and it has anchored this corner for fifty years.

Inside, the apartment is a three-bedroom co-op loft of roughly 2,500 square feet, served by a private elevator that opens directly into the home. The arrival is a dramatic entry foyer, beyond which an oversized living and dining room runs to a chef kitchen, with two full baths and a share in the building's roof deck. Maintenance is 3,859 a month. It is offered at 4,675,000 by Alli Chiaramonte of Compass. The address has been many things, a fur house, a textile works, the wall a painter chose for his first mural, and the loft is a way to live at the center of all of it.

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