46 Carmine Street

The living room sits on the top floor under fourteen foot ceilings, with skylights cut into the roof slope and the beams left showing, so the light comes from above and the windows look out level with the treetops. It is 687 square feet that behaves like more: one bedroom with a generous walk in closet, a loft above that takes a desk or an easel, a decorative fireplace and a wall of exposed brick, a kitchen and a bathroom both recently redone, split system air conditioning, and storage built in where it does not show. Behind the house there is a shared garden with a grill.

The house went up in 1827 and 1828 under a carpenter named Albert Berdan, working in concert with James D. Brower at No. 42 and Seba Bogart at No. 44: three Federal houses raised together in red brick with brownstone trim, each under a peaked roof with a single dormer. The auctioneer James Bleecker advertised Nos. 44 and 46 at one sale on 2 February 1828.

The ground floor has been in trade almost continuously. From 1856 into the 1860s a milliner, Mrs. Melville, sold bonnets there in what her advertisements called New York and Parisian styles. In 1937 the architect Frederick S. Koeler converted the building to a single residence above the shop; a 1960 alteration divided it again into one apartment per floor, which is the arrangement it keeps.

That year Charles Pollock and his wife Elizabeth were living at 46 Carmine in two rooms, and Charles's younger brother Jackson, then twenty, moved in with them. Both men were studying under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League, and the rooms served as a studio as well as a home. It is the address Pollock kept while he was still learning to paint.

The building was designated in June 2010 as part of the Greenwich Village Historic District Extension II, a 235 building extension covering twelve blocks. It stands between Bedford and Bleecker, on a block whose shopfronts have turned over for two centuries without much changing above them.