54 Greene Street #5B

Six stories of cast iron at the southeast corner of Broome and Greene, begun on 24 June 1872 and finished on 28 February 1873. The architect was Isaac F. Duckworth, who kept an office at 291 Broadway and gave SoHo the two buildings the neighborhood later nicknamed: the King of Greene Street at 72 to 76, and the Queen at 28 to 30. He drew this one in the same two-year run, for an owner named R. H. L. Townsend, who wanted a warehouse. Six bays face Broome and nine more turn up Greene, so the building reads as a block rather than a front.

The facade came out of the Aetna Iron Works and the builder was John T. Conover. Conover had spent the previous winter directly across Greene Street, raising the Gunther Building at 469 to 475 Broome to Griffith Thomas's design, also in Aetna iron. He finished the Gunther on 30 May 1872 and broke ground on this corner three and a half weeks later, which is why the two buildings answer each other so exactly across the cobbles.

Duckworth worked in the French Second Empire manner the Landmarks Preservation Commission singles him out for: banded piers, broken pediments, segmental arched windows carried around both elevations. The commission drew the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District around all of it on 14 August 1973. The offering plan converting the warehouse to condominium lofts was approved for sale in September 2016.

A corner loft of 2,871 square feet on the fifth floor, three bedrooms and two and a half baths, with the great room measuring 31 feet by 31 feet under 13 foot ceilings. Oak plank floors run through it. Exposed brick, pressed metal ceilings and fluted columns stay where the warehouse put them, and the segmental arched windows sit on both exposures, so light crosses the floor all day and the view is planted rooftops and the skyline rather than the building opposite. Refurbished cast iron radiators and cast iron tubs are still in service.

Central air, a washer and dryer, a keyed elevator and a common roof deck six floors up. Available now, on the block where the iron came from one foundry and the same builder worked both corners.