19 Greene Street #2F

Greene Street was surveyed in 1787 and named for Nathanael Greene, the Revolutionary War general, but the street the world knows was built in about a decade. On the block between Canal and Grand, nearly every facade is cast iron, most of it raised in the early 1870s, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission catalog reads like a foundry ledger. Nos. 19-21 went up between October 1871 and April 1872: a six-story, six-bay iron front designed by Henry Fernbach for the merchant Simon Strahlheim, built as a store and warehouse by Joseph Thompson. Fernbach, whom the Commission called one of the leading architects working in cast iron, is better remembered uptown for Central Synagogue.

The street had a life before the iron. By the 1850s, Greene, Mercer, and Crosby formed the spine of the city's red-light district, and the designation report itself lingers on the "houses of assignation and ladies' boarding houses that catered to every taste." The dry-goods trade built over all of it, then left; the artists arrived in the lofts a century later; and in August 1973 the city landmarked the whole district, iron fronts, loading docks, and all.

Residence 2F is the building's parlor-level loft, a duplex running nearly the full width of the iron front, with a great room under fourteen-foot ceilings, a row of oversized windows over the street, and fluted columns rising to the beams. The renovation is by Solveig Fernlund, the Swedish-trained architect who founded fernlund + logan with Neil Logan in 1992 and whose interiors for the jewelry designer Ted Muehling and the textile house Maharam defined a particular downtown register: warm, spare, and exact. Her hand is legible everywhere here, in the two sculptural staircases, the corridor of full-height wood wardrobes, and the kitchen reduced to an oak island and a marble backsplash.

The primary bedroom sits on the main level with a walk-in closet and an en-suite bath in white Carrara; a second full marble bath and a washer-dryer complete the floor. Above, a lofted mezzanine overlooks the great room, ready as a second bedroom, library, studio, or office. The whole apartment reads as a gallery waiting for a collection, which is precisely the point of a SoHo loft.

Residence 2F is offered at $16,500 a month through Nick Gavin and Allie Fraza of Compass. Gavin was born and raised in SoHo.

No. 19 sits on the first block above Canal, the quieter end of the district, where the iron facades run nearly unbroken and the morning light comes down the cross streets from the east. Three blocks north is the stretch of Greene Street that economists at NYU traced across four centuries as a study in urban reinvention: fourteen brothels by 1870, Leo Castelli's gallery a century later, luxury flagships today. The same arc runs through this block; it just runs quieter.

Donald Judd's house at 101 Spring Street, the loft that made the case for living with art in SoHo, is a five-minute walk. So are the Canal Street trains, six lines of them, which is the other argument for the corner of the district everyone else walks past.