54 Bleecker Street

George Keister built this Romanesque Revival warehouse for J.B. Cole in 1895, a three bay building set midblock on Bleecker Street. The next year the city extended Lafayette Street south of Great Jones, the rowhouse at the corner came down, and Keister stretched his building two bays east with a new facade for a street that had not existed when construction began. The Landmarks designation report records the sequence plainly: the corner arrived second.

Keister was a theater architect by trade. The Belasco and the Apollo came later from the same hand, which explains a warehouse this composed: cast iron bays with columns, radiating brick lintels, a galvanized iron cornice. By 1914 it ran as a factory, and in the 1980s the floors above the storefronts became eleven condominium lofts.

Residence 2A is the corner unit, 2,122 square feet under ceilings of eleven and a half feet, renovated around the original columns that still mark the old factory grid. Oversized Marvin double hung windows run the north and east walls, and the plan holds three bedrooms and three baths with exposed brick and a wet bar off the great room.

For thirty two years the ground floor corner was the Noho Star, the all day dining room George Schwarz opened in 1985 with his wife, the artist Kiki Kogelnik, and ran until New Year's Eve 2017. Temple Bar, the velvet lounge Schwarz added down the Lafayette side in 1989, was revived in 2021 and still anchors the block after dark.

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