The paper dealers' building
On April 10, 1922 the New-York Tribune reported that the Cross and Brown Company had sold the six-story building at 323 to 327 West 16th Street, 75 feet wide, to the Seymour Company, wholesale paper dealers, who would take the whole of it for salesrooms and stockrooms after extensive alterations. The Buildings Department file agrees: an elevator application in 1922, an alteration in 1923. The building had gone up in 1902 on a lot that held a five-story tenement until 1899, a dressmaking shop before that, and at the far door a saloon whose proprietor was taken to excise court in 1885 for opening on a Sunday.
Four doors, one front
HPD registers the building as 323 to 329 West 16th Street. Four door numbers, one 75-foot front, three narrow lots merged into one 4,594-square-foot parcel. The tenants took title in November 1978, when Howard Kamp and Morris Goldberg conveyed the building to West 16 Tenants Corp, six years before the 1984 date the listing sites carry. Two of the twelve units and 7,000 of the building's 23,650 square feet are still commercial, which is the plain reason the monthly maintenance carries the real estate taxes inside it.
The long room
The apartment is a through-unit, 47 feet 4 inches front to back. The living and dining area runs nearly 38 feet of that, stepping from 10 feet 10 inches at the dining end to 14 feet 2 inches at the living end, with windows at both ends: West 16th Street to the south, the interior of the block to the north. The ceilings are high because 1920s stockroom floors were high. The floors are pre-war, and twice rebuilt, in 1923 for the paper company and again in the conversion that began in 1979 and was not certified until May 1992.
The block
Two doors east the block opens into Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly Playground, half an acre in city hands since 1933, running through to West 17th Street, which is why the middle of this block stays low and planted. Across the street to the south stands 111 Eighth Avenue, the 1931 Port Authority terminal that fills an entire city block and has been Google's East Coast headquarters since 2010. Nothing on this block is landmarked. The lot is zoned R8B, which allows a floor area ratio of 4.0, and the building stands at 5.15. No one could put this envelope back on this lot.
