40 West 15th Street #2A

The lighting that hung in the Gilded Age came from a handful of workshops, and the largest of them sat on West 15th Street. Edward F. Caldwell and Company was founded in 1895 by Edward F. Caldwell and Victor von Lossberg, and by the early 1900s the firm needed room to cast bronze at scale. It built 38-40 West 15th Street as foundry, showrooms and offices, a structure begun in 1903 and finished the following year to designs by the architects D'Oench and Yost, the same office behind the Guardian Life building on Union Square. The building was, in plain terms, a factory for light.

What Caldwell made here went into the period's grandest rooms. The firm worked alongside McKim, Mead and White, Carrere and Hastings, and Cass Gilbert, and its fixtures lit the New York Public Library, the 1902 renovation of the White House, and Henry Clay Frick's residence on Fifth Avenue. The building was engineered for that work, and the bones still show it. Ceilings rise eleven feet. Cast iron columns carry the floors. Roughly fifty feet of frontage runs along 15th Street, the kind of span a foundry needed and an apartment rarely keeps. The industrial structure was never disguised. It was simply lived in.

Unit 2A is a three-bedroom, two-bath co-op loft of full-floor proportions, holding the original columns and the long line of windows along the street. Above it, a roof deck carries a vegetable garden, a quiet inversion of a building once given over to metal and fire. It is offered at 2,750,000, with maintenance of 3,054 a month and a 1.5 percent flip tax, listed by Amy Mendizabal of Compass as a private exclusive. What the price buys is less a renovation than a tenancy in a working piece of the city's history, the place where so much of its light was actually made.