33 Greene Street #4E

The file on this corner is unusually exact. Construction commenced April 25, 1873, and finished December 23, 1873: eight months to raise a five-story store of iron and stone at the northwest corner of Grand and Greene Streets. In the middle of that run came the September bank panic that ended the postwar building boom and idled projects across the city. Not this one. Two days before Christmas, the corner had its building.

The architect was Benjamin W. Warner, the younger of the two Warner brothers whose iron-fronted store buildings appear throughout what is now the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District. Weeks Brothers built it, the designation report names Alexander J. Cotherl as the first owner, and the original function is recorded in a single word: store. Twelve bays face Grand Street; eight more turn the corner up Greene.

Greene Street from Grand to Broome is one of the district's most intact stretches: the Landmarks survey counted twelve stores and warehouses here, seven of them standing before 1870, built for the wholesale dry goods trade that filled these blocks after the Civil War. When the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District was designated in 1973, this building was in its hundredth year, and the corner, the iron, and the cobbled street have been protected ever since.

The fourth floor is a single apartment of roughly 3,200 square feet with no neighbors on the landing. The great room runs forty-five feet along the corner, lit through fourteen oversized double-hung sash windows in two walls, east over Greene Street and south down Grand. Original wood columns mark the structural bays, and the floors are dark hardwood.

Off the main room sit three bedrooms and three baths, a library, and a den, with a chef's kitchen, central air, and a washer dryer. The plan is the building's original logic carried forward: a store took a full floor, and so does the apartment.

The co-op runs ten units in five stories, with a restored entrance and lobby and a key-locked elevator. It has kept the working artists SoHo's iron lofts were known for; the photographer Renate Aller kept the penthouse upstairs for two decades. A hundred and fifty years after Warner's iron went up ahead of schedule, the corner still does what it was drawn to do: one open floor at a time, lit from two streets.