The Story
The building rose in 1902 for builder Richard J. Leary, a ten-story neo-Renaissance store and loft designed by John W. Stevens on the block just west of Fifth Avenue, replacing a three-story house and the stable that stood behind it. Manufacturers filled its floors for the first decades, and by the early 1930s Robert M. McBride and Company, the publisher of James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (the novel New York's Society for the Suppression of Vice seized in 1920 and a judge cleared in 1922), had made the building its address. It carried the McBride name long after.
The lofts went co-op in 1980, sixteen units in all, and in 1989 the block joined the Ladies' Mile Historic District.
The Home
Residence 7B holds 1,400 square feet behind a key-locked elevator: a one-bedroom loft where barrel-vaulted ceilings arc to eleven feet between architectural columns, light oak floors run throughout, and seven oversized windows open east, west, and south. The co-op keeps things flexible for a house of its size, permitting pieds-a-terre, co-purchasing, and subletting, with a virtual doorman, part-time super, laundry room, and bike storage below. Fifth Avenue is a few steps east.
