272 Water Street

Designation List 218, LP-1646, July 11, 1989. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's report on the South Street Seaport Historic District Extension gives 272 Water Street a full paragraph, which is more than most buildings on the block receive, and nearly every sentence of it is about how well the building was made. Two three-storey structures once stood on the lot; the present building and its twin at 274 went up together in 1867 as five-storey warehouses. The cast-iron storefronts, the report says, with Italianate detail characteristic of the period, are particularly handsome.

The Commission's researcher, James T. Dillon, walked the facade and wrote down what survived. Paneled cast-iron square columns with large decorative motifs at mid-height, carrying broad openings whose flat arches curve at the ends. Sheet-metal lintels over the upper windows with egg-and-dart moldings, and metal sills set on ornate iron brackets. The original wooden four-over-four sash, whose wide central muntin was designed to give each window the look of a casement, an Italianate device. In 1989 only the twin still carried its modillioned metal cornice; 272 carries a matching one today. The city's tax roll files the building as built 1867 and now owned by the Seaport Loft Condominium, ten residences on seven floors, on a lot 25 feet wide and 118 deep.

The report is as careful about the ground as the building. Pearl Street, one block west, marks the original shoreline of Manhattan; Water Street and Front Street were made by landfill in the 18th century. The corner of Pearl and Dover, at the top of this block, is the landing site of the first ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn, established in 1638. On the same block stood William Walton's 1752 mansion, the first headquarters of the Bank of New York. From 1818 the packet lines sailed from South Street just below Peck Slip, the first vessels to run a regular schedule between New York and Liverpool. Water Street here is still paved with Belgian block, and the Brooklyn Bridge forms the district's northern edge.

The record stops at the door and the loft takes over. Two floors, 1,519 square feet, at the rear of the building where the block is quiet. The lower floor is one room in three parts: a living room of 23 feet 1 inch by 11 feet 3 inches under three tall windows, a sitting room of 15 feet 10 by 12, a dining area of 15 feet 5 by 12, with exposed brick down both long walls and the original wood floors refinished. A kitchen of 20 feet 11 by 11 feet 3 runs along the north wall in white cabinetry with a professional range. A black steel stair curves up from the living room to the bedroom, 13 by 23 feet 3, and two French doors there open onto a private terrace of 20 feet 5 by 23 feet 6, decked and turfed, with the Municipal Building's tower and the Brooklyn Bridge approach in the view. Two full baths, a washer and dryer, an elevator in the building and a common roof deck above. The Commission wrote its paragraph about the outside. The inside was left for whoever climbs the stair.

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