185 Lafayette Street

For its first decade the building did not stand on Lafayette Street at all. It was a firehouse on Elm Street, built in 1887 for the Fire Department of New York as quarters for Engine Company 55, designed by Napoleon LeBrun & Son, the office that held the city's firehouse commission and would later raise the Metropolitan Life tower that briefly stood as the tallest building in the world.

When the city widened the corridor into Lafayette Street in 1897 and 1898, the engine house was caught in the cut. Rather than demolish it, builders took the front down and rebuilt it to the new property line a full story shorter, lowering and resetting the cornice, the terra cotta rosettes, and the corbelled brick by hand. The polychrome Queen Anne face that meets the street today is that reconstructed 1887 front.

Engine Company 55 moved on to Broome Street at the end of the decade, and the building settled into the working life of the lofts around it: a store-and-loft conversion in 1917, an auto shop by the 1920s, and a residence decades later. It sits inside the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District Extension and carries its own landmark designation as a former firehouse.

Today it is the home of the artist Daniel Arsham. Behind the protected facade the house runs 20.5 feet wide, with beamed ceilings of 13 to 15 feet on every floor and a roof terrace above. The ground floor is still a garage, reached through the original curb cut, where a Porsche 964 now parks in the bay that once held the engine.

The cast-iron spiral stair was kept and repainted a soft green that turns up throughout the house, on the car, in the fixtures, and against the board-formed concrete walls where Arsham set his cast figures. The interiors were photographed for Architectural Digest in 2023. It is listed at $8,995,000.

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