32 Washington Square West #3E

When the fifteen-story tower at 32 Washington Square West opened in 1925, the park's west side was still mostly rowhouse fabric. CityRealty's building history attributes the design to Deutsch and Schneider, working for the Washington Square Holding Corp., whose sole owner was Maurice Deutsch himself, the classic 1920s arrangement of an architect acting as his own developer. It was a bet on a blockfront that had not yet decided what it wanted to be.

The bet paid off quickly. Gronenberg and Leuchtag followed with No. 29 in 1926-27 and No. 37 in 1928, and within a few years the square's western edge had been remade into a wall of doorman apartment houses facing the trees. No. 32 led that transformation off, the first tower of the decade that gave Washington Square West its present character.

The site had a life before the tower. By CityRealty's account, the lot held the Hicks-Lord house, an Italianate mansion of 1850-51 built for the merchant Joseph W. Alsop, later a social hub under the widow Annette Hicks-Lord and, in Theodore Roosevelt's era, the clubhouse of the Progressive Party. The address was drawing the city's attention half a century before anyone thought to stack apartments on it.

Residence 3E is seven rooms: four bedrooms, three baths, and an expansive living room the listing describes as anchored by a wood-burning fireplace, with what the brokers call picturesque views over Washington Square Park. It is offered, in the listing's own words, in estate condition, a rare opportunity to create a bespoke home.

Estate condition is the honest phrase for what this is: prewar rooms that have waited out the renovation cycles, ready for one coherent idea rather than a patchwork of previous owners' taste. With only two residences on each floor, the raw material is unusually good, and the address does the rest.

No. 32 is red brick trimmed in terra cotta, its base marked by paired two-story Corinthian pilasters under a stringcourse set with low-relief terra-cotta urns, a canopied entrance below. Thirty-one units share the fifteen floors, two to a landing. The building still staffs an elevator operator alongside the full-time doorman, a piece of 1925 service culture that has mostly vanished from the city, and it has stood within the Greenwich Village Historic District since the district's designation in April 1969.

Its modern ledger is quietly starry. Mary-Louise Parker owned a duplex here until 2013, and in 2016 Seth Meyers and Alexi Ashe bought that same apartment, a five-bedroom duplex counting twenty-six windows and two wood-burning fireplaces. In a co-op this small, homes do not come up often.

Washington Square West is the short park-facing stretch of the Village's western edge, its 1920s towers the quiet counterpoint to The Row's 1830s houses along Washington Square North. NYU's law school sits a block away, and the park itself does the work of a front yard, arch and fountain and all.

The blockfront's most storied resident arrived during the war years. Eleanor Roosevelt lived a few doors up at 29 Washington Square West, apartment 15-A, from 1942 to 1949, in a seven-room apartment overlooking the park, per the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. The First Lady's windows held the same trees that 3E's do now.

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