53 Greene Street #3

Greene Street narrows here, between Grand and Broome, into one of the densest early-commercial cast-iron-era blocks in SoHo, a corridor of stores and storehouses raised when the district was the city's dry-goods center. 53 Greene is the building that opened a furrier's run along it. William H. Gunther had it built in 1867, four years before he raised the white-cast-iron Gunther Building that anchors the Broome corner, and so it reads as his first, quieter act on the block: the warehouse before the showpiece. The whole corridor was protected when the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District was designated in 1973.

The architect was Louis Burger, and the original use was plain commerce, a store and storehouse for the fur trade. The front is brick-and-iron masonry rather than a full cast-iron face, the workaday register of the period rather than the parade version next door.

In 2014 a conversion led by the developer AORE, with RSVP Architecture Studio and N Plus Architecture, reworked the building into five full-floor residences and a duplex penthouse. The facade was re-fronted in Tuckahoe marble as part of that work, a contemporary treatment over the older bones rather than original fabric.

Unit 3 takes a full floor, thirty-four feet wide, with direct elevator entry that opens onto the entire plan. The interior was taken to the studs and rebuilt behind the historic front, so the loft is new work inside an old shell.

Ceilings rise to twelve feet, the height a storehouse was built for, over 2,771 square feet that hold two bedrooms and three baths.

The loft is listed by Todd Lewin and Michael Rubin, The Lewin Rubin Team at Compass, last asking 7,150,000, and is now in contract. It leaves on the block where Gunther began, a few doors from the building that carries his name.

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