The record
The tax assessment records of 1867-68 show a six-story store and loft building going up on White Street for Henry Lewis and Joseph Frailey Smith, and apartment 2A at 17 White Street sits inside it today, under a tin ceiling and a timber beam, among white columns, herringbone floors and a library wall with a rolling ladder.
The lot had held two frame dwellings and a structure used for hazardous purposes. What replaced them was faced in sandstone and crowned with a slate mansard roof, with oculus windows and an elaborate dormer at the roofline. The Landmarks Preservation Commission, in its 1992 report on the Tribeca East Historic District, classed the building as Second Empire, masonry with cast-iron elements, and listed the architect as unknown. The first story kept its cast-iron columns and piers.
What it held
By the 1890s the building let office space to out-of-town dry goods firms, among them Pollock and Bernheimer of Mobile, Alabama, and Joseph Metzenbaum of Cleveland. In the 1940s a manufacturer of mirrors had it. Since September 2020 the ground floor has held the Tribeca gallery of Luhring Augustine.
Inside 2A
The main room carries its tall windows, a pressed-tin ceiling and columns with capitals. The kitchen is walnut with a marble island and a built-in banquette. The floors in the principal rooms are herringbone, and one bathroom has a clawfoot tub on a mosaic floor.
The renovation
TBD Architecture + Design Studio gut renovated the loft. By the studio's own account, the plan keeps the spirit of the open loft while adding enclosed and semi-enclosed rooms: a thickened storage wall runs the length of the floor, dividing the living and dining area from the service spaces and bedrooms, and it carries built-in shelving and the ducts for a new air conditioning system. Large arched openings between the service spaces are inspired by Tribeca's cast-iron architecture, and a wide hallway draws light deep into the loft.
TBD was founded in 2011 by the architects Selin Semaan and Josh Weiselberg, both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. The office, in lower Manhattan, has completed more than 40 projects, from interior renovations to additions and new construction.
