15 William Street #11DE

15 William Street rose in 2008 as the only ground-up residential building in the Financial District, a 47-story, 528-foot condominium tower and a flagship of the post-2000 wave that turned a district of office towers residential. It was designed by Tsao & McKown, with Ismael Leyva Architects and SLCE Architects serving as architects of record.

The development group included SDS Investments, the Sapir Organization, Andre Balazs Properties, and CIM Group. Originally marketed as the William Beaver House, after its Beaver Street corner, the tower took its nickname, the Post-It Note Building, from a dark-grey-and-gold paneled facade.

Andre Balazs marketed the building to young Wall Street buyers with a citywide billboard campaign starring a tuxedo-clad cartoon beaver, and set the sales office inside a converted historic bank. The interiors and public spaces were the work of SPAN Architecture and Allied Works.

At its 2008 opening it stood alone, the only ground-up residential development in a district that had been built for finance, not for living. The campaign and the name fixed it in the downtown imagination before a single resident moved in.

Residence 11DE is two units on the eleventh floor, quietly combined into one home of roughly 1,998 square feet, configured as three bedrooms and three baths. The apartment is already physically combined, with a buyer formally completing the combination.

Ten-foot ceilings run throughout, and oversized double-glazed windows frame the East River and the city. The plan holds a built-in home office, multi-zone climate control, and an in-unit washer and dryer.

The building carries a full slate of services: a full-time and virtual doorman, a concierge, a pool, a gym, a media room, a children's playroom, a roof deck, a courtyard, and a garage. The amenities place it squarely in the post-2000 generation of downtown condominium towers.

To live here is to hold a wide, high floor in the first new residential address the Financial District built for itself. The streets below were all offices a generation ago; now the East River sits in the windows, with the rest of the city past it.

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