27 North Moore Street #10D

Residence 10D takes the classic warehouse-duplex arrangement and gets the proportions right. The lower floor is given almost entirely to one room, a 34-by-20-foot living and dining hall under ceilings that stop just shy of thirteen feet, its windows drawing steady northern light across the loft. The kitchen runs Bulthaup cabinetry with Sub-Zero appliances and a pair of dishwashers, built for someone who actually cooks; a den with its own bath doubles as a media room or guest quarters, and a fourth bedroom rounds out the floor. Upstairs the house quiets down: three bedrooms face south toward the roofline of lower Tribeca, an office slips in as a playroom or study, and the primary suite takes a walk-in shower.

The building spent its first century as infrastructure. William H. Birkmire designed 27 North Moore in 1905 for the Merchants Refrigerating Company, whose cold stores lined this block and held dairy for the Washington Market trade; the Romanesque facade was laid up with blind windows, because a refrigerated warehouse wanted mass, not light. The company’s history has the texture of the working waterfront: an ammonia tank rupture at the complex in September 1905, during which an engineer refused to cut the ammonia flow lest the food spoil, and a First World War contract keeping perishables for the U.S. Army. When Washington Market decamped, the buildings went dark until Joseph Pell Lombardi’s late-1990s conversion, one of Tribeca’s first true high-end condominium projects.

Lombardi’s move was the audacious part: he persuaded the Landmarks Preservation Commission to let him cut a ten-story light court straight through the building’s core, then bank the removed floor area on the roof as two-story penthouses, one of which belonged to Billy Crystal. The result was 58 lofts with the deep floor plates and heavy masonry of cold storage and the light of a courtyard building. The company it keeps on North Moore is its own credential: John F. Kennedy Jr. lived across the street at 20 North Moore until 1999, and the block sits inside the Tribeca West Historic District. Residence 10D has waited out all of it; this is its first time on the market in more than twenty-three years.

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