168 Duane Street

New Building permit 946 of 1886: a five-story store and loft for Fleming Smith on the south side of Duane Park, Stephen Decatur Hatch, architect, Robert L. Darragh, builder, on a lot about thirty feet wide along Duane Street and 127 feet deep toward Reade. The site had been one of four old houses linked together as Hungerford's Hotel, on the map by 1857 and out of business by 1885. Hatch, who trained under John B. Snook and built the Gilsey House, gave Smith brick with stone trim, cast iron across the first story, multipane Queen Anne sash, and a gable at the fifth story that the Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1991 designation report calls "an elaborate crowning Flemish gable," idiosyncratic enough that the report suspects it inspired the one added to 71 Hudson Street in 1896. Smith liked the result. In 1891 he had Hatch draw the Fleming Smith Warehouse at Washington and Watts Streets, a landmark since 1978.

The tenants ran from salt, root beer syrup and patent medicines to the trade of the park, butter and eggs, ending with Carl Ahlers, wholesaler, from the early 1930s into the early 1970s. The condominium declaration was recorded on July 18, 1988, sponsor 168 Duane Street L.P., care of Rockefeller Properties: Meile Rockefeller, thirty-one, a great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller Jr., with John T. Fifield Associates as architects, eight lofts over two commercial units. On February 12, 1991, a trust bought units 4N and 5N from the sponsor. A 1992 filing names Warrington and Reginald Hudlin beside the trustee, and in May 2005 the trust deeded both units to Warrington Hudlin, who filed that September to join them with a new stair.

What the two deeds describe is the park side of the top two floors. What the brokers describe is about 3,500 square feet on three levels, a ceiling that reaches thirty feet, and a terrace set back behind the original parapet with the trees of Duane Park in front of it, offered as found and in original condition: the volume, the light and the park are in place. The building is fitting a new elevator, due in November, and the apartment is shown privately until then.

The top three floors were Warrington Hudlin's for about thirty five years. Born in East St. Louis in 1952 and a Yale Scholar of the House, he shot Street Corner Stories in 1977, co-founded the Black Filmmaker Foundation the year after, and in 1979 organised the first annual Black film festival in New York. With his brother Reginald he produced House Party in 1990, which took the Filmmakers Trophy at Sundance, and Boomerang with Eddie Murphy in 1992. He was an early tenant at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Center when the neighbourhood's future was still an open question, and he stayed. He worked between New York and Los Angeles and used these floors mainly as a studio; a scene with Eddie Murphy was shot inside the apartment. The House Party one-sheet is still on the wall.

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