45 Walker Street

New Building application 140 of 1888, filed for a store and loft at 43-45 Walker Street. The owner named on it is Maria I. Schermerhorn. The builder is Robinson and Wallace. The architect is Charles C. Haight, and that is the line in the record worth stopping on.

Haight was the son of a Trinity Church minister, trained in the office of Emlen T. Littell, and opened his own practice in 1867. His reputation rests on collegiate Gothic: the midtown campus he drew for Columbia College between 1880 and 1884, the quadrangles and chapel of the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, and at Yale, Vanderbilt Hall of 1894 and Phelps Hall of 1896, the gatehouse you pass through to reach the Old Campus. Walker Street got a different Haight. The Landmarks Preservation Commission describes the front here as a late-nineteenth-century commercial style set out on a grid, giant piers doing the work arches had done on his White Street building of 1881, and it files 43-45 Walker among the last cast-iron fronts raised anywhere in the district, in company with 268-270 Canal Street of 1886 and 1887. Cast iron was going out of fashion by then. He used it anyway, and austerely: double-height piers below, one-story piers above, paneled spandrels, a metal cornice, and nothing decorative competing with them.

Two masonry structures occupied by a manufacturer and importer of feathers, flowers, dusters and plumes, with a two-story dwelling behind them. Fifty and a half feet of Walker Street frontage, cleared in 1888 for a building fifty and a half feet wide. That figure is the one to carry upstairs, because the width of the lot became the width of the room, and the room still is the width of the building.

Elias Frankfurt, a clothing merchant. Israel Unterberg, who sold shirts. E. Gips and Brother, of Albany, in hosiery, gloves and fancy goods. Field Brothers, in blankets, quilts, towels and terries. By the middle of the twentieth century the lower two floors held stores and the upper floors held a factory, and when the Tribeca East Historic District was designated on December 2, 1992, two textile companies were still in the building. The conversion to six residential lofts came at the turn of the next century, credited by the listing to Platt Byard Dovell, now PBDW Architects; the city's alteration record for the lot is dated 2002.

One of the six, and it takes the whole floor. A key-locked elevator opens into it. The living and dining room runs the 50-foot width of the building behind eight oversized windows, with original cast-iron columns standing free in the floor on their molded bases, wide dark-stained plank boards underfoot, ceilings of roughly 11 feet, and a wood-burning fireplace. At the end of that run, a study behind glass, usable as a library, a media room or a fourth bedroom with a bath beside it. The kitchen is built around a marble island with counter seating, Viking and Sub-Zero appliances, two Miele dishwashers, and a bar with dual wine storage. Past a den and an enclosed library, the bedroom wing begins: a primary suite with south-facing light and two walk-in closets, its marble bath holding a glass shower, a double vanity and a freestanding tub set beside an interior window, then two more bedrooms with baths of their own. Two private storage units transfer with the apartment. A century and a half of dry goods moved through this floor. It has been quiet since.