46 White Street #5

White Street runs through the heart of what was once New York's dry-goods district, the blocks where importers stacked bolts of cloth in cast-iron lofts and sold them by the gross. Number 46 still announces itself. A carved marble pediment crowns the facade, four floors of white marble above a cast-iron storefront, and reads Woods Mercantile Buildings, 1865.

That was the year Abraham and Samuel Wood, dry-goods merchants who lived across the river in Brooklyn, put up the structure as speculative space for the trade. Tenants followed the cloth. Wm. I. Peake & Co. sold mohair here under its Beaver brand; the Irish linen house Barbour Brothers, whose flax mills traced to 1784, ran one of the largest operations of its kind in America from these floors; Henry Glass & Co. spread its linen business across 46 and 48 White. The architect's name never made the record, which only deepens the sense that the building was built to work, not to be admired.

The upper floors were converted to residences in 1978 and 1979, and in 1979 the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building individually, citing its design and architectural importance; it sits as well within the Tribeca East Historic District, drawn in 1992 around the old textile core. Today five lofts live behind its 38-foot marble front.

Unit 5 is a floor-through of 2,902 square feet, three bedrooms and two and a half baths. The conversion left the nineteenth century where it counted, in the cast-iron columns and the brick, and let in the twentieth: long banks of windows, hardwood floors, central air, ceilings near fourteen feet. It changed hands this spring for $4,398,000, having last been asked at $4,750,000.

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