29 King Street #3G

The building at 29 King Street was designed by the man whose job was designing schools. David I. Stagg served as Superintendent of School Buildings for the New York City Board of Education, a post he was appointed to in 1872, and in 1886 he drew this one. It rose in Queen Anne brick and limestone and was completed in August 1887, opening as Grammar School No. 8 and Public School No. 8.

It began as a boys grammar school. Girls were admitted from 1889, for evening classes, and decades later the building took on a new identity as the Livingston School for Girls in 1958. Its civic life ended in 1981, when the Board of Education put the building up for auction, and the conversion to condominiums came after.

The proportions are the inheritance. Unit 3G carries ceilings near fifteen feet and southern windows that run ten feet tall, scale that came standard in a building meant to teach by daylight. It is laid out as two bedrooms and a bath and a half, with a sleeping loft fit into the height and a shared courtyard for the residence.

Conversions usually sand the original use away. This one keeps it. The volume and the glass still belong to the schoolroom they were built for, and the home lives inside that frame rather than against it.

29 King Street stands in the Charlton-King-Vandam Historic District, designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1966, at the meeting point of the West Village and SoHo in Hudson Square. The protection is among the city's earliest, and the block keeps its 19th-century register intact.

One note for the curious. StreetEasy auto-lists the building's year as 1900, a tidy round number the archive does not support. The Board of Education's own history and the building's documentation place it in 1886 and 1887, and the record is what holds.

The asking price is 2,750,000. The listing is represented by David Christopher Salvatore of Red Jacket Residential.

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