171 Duane Street #3

The corner of Duane and Staple Streets has been built on for two centuries. Local histories place a one-room schoolhouse here in the early 1800s, replaced around 1828 by a three-story Federal building, and by the 1880s the address had turned commercial, leased to coffee and spice wholesalers as lower Manhattan filled with the trade in provisions. The egg and butter dealer M.J. King worked the ground floor, one of the firms that gave the surrounding blocks their old name, the Butter and Egg District. The building stands in the Tribeca West Historic District, and the exact year of the current loft is unsettled in the record, so the honest version is that the corner is older than any single date on it.

What survives is a cast-iron loft of the kind these blocks were built from, set a block from Duane Park and around the corner from the Staple Street skybridge, the slender 1907 crossing that still links two buildings a story above the street. Inside, unit 3 keeps the proportions intact. Eleven-foot ceilings run in wood plank overhead, arched windows open on three exposures, and the floors are polished concrete. Entry is by keyed elevator, which opens directly into the apartment rather than onto a shared hall, so the full floor reads as one room before it is divided.

The loft is two bedrooms and one bath across roughly 2,000 square feet, offered furnished or unfurnished and available the first of August at 15,000 dollars a month. James Attard of Tabak Real Estate has the listing. The light moves around the corner through the day, north and east and the angle where Duane meets Staple, and the plan holds the openness that the windows and the ceiling height set up. It is a chance to live on a corner that has been a schoolhouse, a spice house, and a provisions market, and is now simply a place to rent in Tribeca.

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