145 Hudson Street #PH

Long before there was a building here, there was a landlord: Trinity Church, which has held this ground in Hudson Square since the 1700s and leased it out rather than sell. In 1929 the result was a fourteen-story reinforced-concrete factory, the former Hudson Square Building, put up for Trinity with the Vivian Green Company as lessee.

Its architect was Renwick, Aspinwall and Guard, the direct successor firm to James Renwick Jr., who drew St. Patrick's Cathedral, Grace Church, and the Smithsonian Castle. The same architectural bloodline that gave New York its great Gothic cathedral gave Tribeca this concrete loft. The Landmarks Preservation Commission, which placed the building in the Tribeca West Historic District in 1991, classes it as 1920s industrial with Art Deco elements, a factory rather than a cast-iron front or a Deco spire.

The home on the roof is the work of the glass artist James Carpenter, whose studio engineered the cable-net glass wall of 7 World Trade Center. Roughly 7,500 square feet of interior sits behind floor-to-ceiling glass under eighteen-foot ceilings, wrapped on the outside by a 4,500-square-foot terrace. There are four bedrooms and four and a half baths.

It did not arrive without a fight. An earlier version of the penthouse rose past the district's height limits and was ordered demolished by Landmarks, then rebuilt, with the current structure completed around 2007.

In 2009 the penthouse sold for 30,500,000, at the time the highest price paid for a condominium anywhere in Manhattan below Columbus Circle. It went on to a second life on screen as Bobby Axelrod's apartment on the Showtime series Billions.

The building has been a residential condominium, addressed both 145 Hudson Street and 1 Hubert Street, since its conversion early in the 2000s. The penthouse is offered at 59,500,000, co-exclusive with the St. Andre Team at Compass and Adam Modlin of The Modlin Group.

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