37B Crosby Street

When the Landmarks Preservation Commission surveyed the east side of Crosby Street in 2010, it gave this building one sentence. There is an additional brick building, it wrote, not visible from the street, located at the rear of the lot. No architect, no date, no description. The Commission was cataloguing what faced the street, and 37B Crosby does not face the street.

It holds more than the Commission needed. 37B Crosby carries its own tax lot and its own building number, separate from the two buildings in front of it, six stories and six residences. Its co-operative was filed under the name 35-1/2 Crosby Realty Corp, which is the building describing its own position better than any survey has. The construction date is the one thing the record will not settle: the city's tax rolls say 1900, the listings say 1885, and no permit or designation report supports either.

The two buildings between it and Crosby Street are documented. Number 35 went up around 1849, number 37 around 1856, both as stores and tenements, both by builders the record does not name. The Commission's own account of the district in those years is worth quoting: it had declined, it says, into tenements, factories, stables, saloons and gambling halls. This block was designated in 2010, in the Extension, not in the original 1973 district.

In the autumn of 1994 New York Magazine began listing a bar a few doors along this row, under the heading of a downtown concept bar. The concept was the menu. Red Stripe, Dragon Stout, Ting, Hennessy, Baileys and Amaretto, the listing read, and that's it. It was called Red Strype, spelled with a Y, after the Jamaican beer, and Frommer's guide of the same year adds that it served Jamaican food to go with it. The magazine put it at 33 Crosby and Frommer's at 35; the two buildings are neighbours and the record does not settle which door it was. It ran through February 1995. By the twelfth of March the Daily News was listing a tapas bar at the same address, called N, which the Times returned to in 1997, 1998 and 2000, once to say it was among the best places in the city to drink sherry. It has since closed.

Thomas Struth photographed Crosby Street in 1978. The print is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Struth counted it among the images that defined the project he later called Unconscious Places. Roughly five thousand artists were living in SoHo that year. The street he photographed is the street this building has always stood behind.

Unit 3 holds a full floor, about 1,200 square feet, with windows on three sides, thirteen of them, in wood sash, each carrying interior louvered wood shutters hung to fold back into the reveals. The living and dining room measures 25 feet 6 by 24 feet 6. Three wood-burning fireplaces are drawn on the plan and all three work. The primary bedroom carries the third and has its own bath; the room beside it is drawn as a dressing room and is the second of the two bedrooms the listing counts. Maintenance is 2,073 dollars a month with the taxes inside it.

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