138 Broadway #5G

By 1884, Smith, Gray and Co. was claiming to be the largest maker of boys' clothing in the world, and it built accordingly. Having outgrown its 1870 quarters down the block, the firm commissioned William H. Gaylor to raise a bigger store and factory on the corner of Broadway and Bedford Avenue, a Neo-Grec design with a genuinely rare distinction: two full cast-iron facades, one to each street, the iron cast at the Jackson works. Retail ran along the ground floor. The sewing floors stacked above.

The company behind it was a Brooklyn institution. Edward Smith opened a Manhattan tailoring business in 1833, then partnered with his brother-in-law Allen Gray, a patternmaker, to mass-produce ready-made boys' clothing. The firm closed during the Civil War, relaunched in Williamsburg in 1864, and within a decade was Brooklyn's largest ready-made clothing maker.

A note on names, because the record gets muddled. The individually landmarked Smith, Gray and Co. Building is 103 Broadway, the firm's 1870 building, also by Gaylor. Number 138 carries no plaque; it is the bigger corner sequel, the same architect and the same client working at larger scale four years on.

The HK Organization acquired the building in 2000 and completed its conversion to 40 condominiums around 2002, marketing it as The Smith Grey, the altered spelling a quirk of the condo branding. A penthouse level went on top; the Corinthian columns and wood floors stayed. The result is loft housing that did not have to invent its own character, because the factory left plenty behind.

5G runs 1,787 square feet across three bedrooms and two baths, with ceilings near ten feet and a private balcony, an amenity the sewing floor certainly never offered. For a tenant, the practical headline is scarcity: condo-grade loft space at this scale almost never reaches the rental market on the South Side. This is the full loft condition on a lease.

Day to day, the building runs at a boutique register. Forty units share an elevator, a live-in super, a bike room, and laundry on every floor, and the furnished roof deck opens the whole compass of the skyline. There is no doorman, which suits a building this size.

This is the South Side's Broadway, the stretch that runs beneath the elevated J, M, and Z tracks toward the Marcy Avenue station, a corridor that still carries the texture of Williamsburg's nineteenth-century commercial spine. The el is part of the deal here, and so is what grew up around it.

Peter Luger, Diner, and Meadowsweet are all within a few blocks, which puts three generations of Brooklyn dining inside a short walk. Bedford Avenue runs north from the corner toward the rest of the neighborhood, and the bridge is close enough that Manhattan reads as an extension of the block rather than a commute.

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