395 Broadway

Block 193, lot 7501, the condominium's billing lot. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1992 designation report for the Tribeca East Historic District files the building on the west side of Broadway at Walker Street as the Equitable Life Assurance Building, Nos. 395 to 399 Broadway, also 61 to 69 Walker Street: new building application 2125 of 1899, architect Robert Maynicke, commissioned by the developer Peter J. Merrick and finished in 1901 under Henry Corn, a store, loft and office building of fifteen stories on a steel frame. The city's own record dates it to 1901. The report is precise about the footprint, fifty and a half feet on Broadway and almost 128 feet down Walker Street, which is why a corner apartment here gets windows on two long walls.

Six masonry buildings came down for it. Three were Federal-era houses on Broadway that had been turned to trade; one held Gustav G. Lansing's railway and steamship ticket office and Sterns and Weil, importers of Yankee notions and fancy goods. No. 61 Walker Street was a five-story store and loft with a cast-iron front from the Architectural Iron Works, put up for the Goelet family. Nos. 63 and 65 Walker were three stories, a restaurant and dry-goods firms. The tenants who moved into Maynicke's building were the district's usual: an Erie Railroad ticket office, a purveyor of parasols and umbrellas, and two Franklin Street dry-goods houses, King, Beals and Company and Cromwell Brothers, who specialized in dress linings. In 1930, with Equitable still the owner, Starrett and Van Vleck set the storefronts back so Broadway could be widened. The upper stories went residential in 1981, per the Commission; the listing dates the condominium to 1983.

Maynicke was born in Germany in 1848, studied at Cooper Union and spent 1872 to 1895 in the office of George B. Post, where the elevator building was being worked out: the Mills Building, the Produce Exchange, the Cotton Exchange. On his own, and later as Maynicke and Franke, he designed more than a hundred large commercial buildings and became the single most prolific architect in what is now the Ladies' Mile Historic District. No. 395 is his one building in Tribeca East, and the Commission reads it as neo-Renaissance: limestone and terra cotta, five bays on Broadway and twelve on Walker, a two-story limestone base of coursed piers on a polished granite watertable, eleven stories of deep-set windows between band courses, and an arcaded two-story crown under a modillioned cornice that ends in lions' heads. The ground floor, formerly a Pearl River Mart, has been Arne Glimcher's gallery 125 Newbury since 2022.

The apartment is on a high floor of the fifteen, at the corner, with nine oversized windows facing north, east and southwest under ceilings of ten and a half feet. The listing credits the interior to SAS, Solomonoff Architecture Studio, the firm Galia Solomonoff founded in 2004, and it reads as one continuous move: white walls, wide-plank oak floors, and a wall of full-height built-in closets running the foyer, where a round iron column on a bolted base plate stands free. The living room measures 14 feet 2 by 16 feet 8 on the floor plan, with the dining area beside it and the kitchen, 13 feet 10 by 8 feet 2, fitted with all-electric European appliances, an induction stovetop, a vertical pantry and custom cabinetry, copper pots hung above the range. The primary bedroom, 11 feet 8 by 16 feet 2, takes the east and southwest windows through a walk-through closet to a bath tiled floor to ceiling in blue Moroccan squares around an oversized soaking tub with Waterworks fittings. The second bedroom is a library, Vitsoe shelving on every wall and a floor-to-ceiling curtain in place of a door; a second full bath has a steam shower. From the southwest windows, 56 Leonard and the spire of One World Trade; from the east, the tower of the Manhattan Bridge. The building keeps a live-in superintendent, a restored lobby, laundry on every other floor with washer-dryers permitted in the units, and a landscaped roof deck over the Hudson.

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