42 Wooster Street #3

Wooster Street is one of the streets the Landmarks Preservation Commission was thinking of when it designated the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District in 1973. The district holds the largest concentration of cast-iron architecture anywhere in the world, and 42 Wooster is part of it, a single bay in the 42-50 Wooster frontage. The line the commission drew is the reason the block still reads the way it did when these buildings went up: low loft facades, tall windows, iron columns standing in for stone.

The building was finished in 1883, six stories of commercial loft space built for a working district. Its front was cast in iron and detailed by Jarvis Morgan Slade, born in 1853 and dead in November 1882 at twenty-nine, the year before the building was completed. Slade worked in the cast-iron commercial vocabulary of his moment, with other fronts to his name from the same years. His authorship of 42 Wooster comes down through architectural and real-estate accounts rather than a primary landmarks record, so it is stated plainly here: he drew the front.

What happened to the building between its first life and its second is the more telling story. By the 1990s 42 Wooster had stood largely vacant for over a decade, which was the ordinary trajectory for SoHo's manufacturing lofts in the years before residential use caught up to them.

In 1997 numbers 42 and 50 were combined into the Wooster Street Condominium. The renovation architect was Lawrence B. Bogdanow; the developers were Tony Leichter, Axel Stawsky, and Charles Blaichman. The conversion turned a pair of empty loft buildings into apartments without flattening what made them worth saving, and the cast-iron columns inside are the evidence.

Unit 3 occupies an entire floor. It is laid out across a fifty-foot frontage with six windows facing the street and three exposures in all, so light arrives from more than one direction through the day. The interior runs 4,497 square feet, with four bedrooms and three and a half baths.

The original cast-iron columns remain, structural and visible, along with a fireplace. The contemporary additions are the ones a full floor needs: central air, a washer and dryer in the unit, and long unbroken walls built to hang work, the loft as a place to live and to look at things at the same time.

42 Wooster Street, Unit 3 is offered at $9,995,000. The listing is held by Daniela Sassoun and the Mistovich team at Sotheby's International Realty. For a full-floor cast-iron loft that came through its vacant decade intact, on a landmarked SoHo block, the number tracks with what the floor actually is.

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