Built for the hat trade
William H. Wheeler, president of the Fifth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street Realty Company, commissioned this twelve-story loft building in 1909, betting that the millinery and apparel trades would keep pushing north toward 38th Street. His architects, Starrett and Van Vleck, were about to become the department store specialists of the era: their Lord and Taylor flagship rose around the corner on Fifth Avenue in 1914, and Saks Fifth Avenue followed a decade later. For the Wheeler they drew a two-story commercial base under ten floors of lofts, with a carved cartouche naming the building below the second-story cornice.
By the 1911 opening nearly every floor was let. The play publisher Samuel French and the Munich art house Franz Hanfstaengl took the stores, New York Telephone an upper floor, and hat makers, Clover Hat and Oriole Hat among them, worked the lofts for decades. In 1980 the preservation architect Joseph Pell Lombardi oversaw the building's conversion to a residential co-op, cut as two lofts per floor above the shops.
The penthouse, in duplex
PHW holds the top of the building, about 3,100 square feet on two floors joined by a floating stair, in a renovation the listing credits to Workshop/APD, the design firm whose own studio faces the Wheeler from 39 West 38th Street. The living floor sits above: a wood-burning fireplace, a windowed kitchen in Sub-Zero, Viking, and Miele under Caesarstone counters. Aged smoked Chambord oak runs underfoot, set against split-faced diamond grey limestone, dark patina steel, and satin glass.
Both suites take the level below. The primary has a dressing room, a stone-framed gas fireplace, and a bath in limestone and teak; the second suite gets a skylit bath behind frosted glass. Up top, a landscaped deck is wired for sound and set up for a gas grill, and an ipe and metal stair climbs to a roof terrace with the Empire State Building dead ahead, two blocks from Bryant Park.
