14 Saint Luke's Place

St. Luke's Place is a renamed stretch of Leroy Street, fifteen brick townhouses raised in 1851 and 1852 as a single Anglo-Italianate development facing a Trinity Church cemetery, since filled in as James J. Walker Park. No. 14 holds the row's best literary claim. Marianne Moore moved into the basement with her mother in 1918, worked a part-time desk at the Hudson Park library branch at 66 Leroy, and published her first collection, Poems, in 1921 while living here, describing the block to Ezra Pound as "the little quiet part" of New York. Theodore Dreiser was two doors down at No. 16, Sherwood Anderson at No. 12, Max Eastman at No. 11.

Robert De Niro owned the house for roughly three decades, selling in 2012 for $9.5 million after first asking $14 million. The renovation that followed was technically exacting: BarlisWedlick rebuilt the house as a certified passive house, winning the Landmarks Preservation Commission's first approval of triple-pane French casement windows on a landmarked facade, sealing twelve of the fourteen original fireplaces for airtightness, restoring the original winding stair and extending it to a new penthouse pitched so it disappears from the street, its solar panels concealed behind the roofline.

The house runs 5,155 square feet across five floors plus a finished basement, with an elevator serving all six levels and a triple parlor behind the 1852 facade. The kitchen pairs oak cabinets and marble counters with a six-burner Lacanche range and opens to a breakfast room; the principal suite keeps a private terrace, one of four. Three fireplaces still work, a wine cellar and recreation room fill the basement, and the garden runs 58 feet deep behind the 22-foot-wide lot. Four bedrooms and three and a half baths, offered furnished, available November 1.

The block between Hudson Street and Seventh Avenue South is the only stretch of Leroy Street to carry the 1851 renaming for St. Luke in the Fields, the 1822 Trinity parish nearby. The whole row faces south over James J. Walker Park, named for the Jazz Age mayor who lived at No. 6, and the library branch where Moore worked still operates at 66 Leroy. Bedford and Commerce Streets, and the restaurants of the far West Village, are a block or two in any direction.

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