55 White Street

In 1865 Daniel D. Badger published Illustrations of Iron Architecture, the catalog of his Architectural Iron Works, and among the plates he chose to show off was the front his foundry had cast four years earlier at 55 White Street. The elevation is iron end to end, double-height arcades carried on columns so slender that observers of the day named the type for the sperm candle, the taper rendered from whale oil. The Landmarks Preservation Commission would later call it an especially noteworthy example of the form, and Badger's foundry plaques are still bolted to the iron pilasters at the rear.

The building went up in 1860 and 1861 for John Eliot Condict and Samuel H. Condict, cousins in the leather trade, to designs by John Kellum and Son. Condict firms made cartridge boxes and dealt in saddlery and military goods through the Civil War years, and the tenant rolls after them read like a downtown ledger: woolens, laces and embroideries, rope and flags, and leather again by the twentieth century.

The iron has been tested twice. In February 1922 more than a thousand tons of baled cotton burned in the sub-cellars, and the facade came through needing little beyond new glass and paint. In 1988 a developer proposed a thirty-three story tower that would have carried nine new floors over the Condict roof; the Landmarks Preservation Commission answered by designating 55 White an individual New York City landmark on March 22, 1988. The upper floors were converted to homes about two years later, and the Tribeca East Historic District followed in December 1992, so the block now carries both protections.

Unit 1C holds three floors of the landmark. The great room rises double height past Corinthian cast-iron columns and oversized sash windows, and a mezzanine catwalk bridges the space on its way to the primary suite, which takes a tray ceiling, an oversized custom closet, and a spa bath with a walk-in shower and double vanity. Below the entertaining floor sits a den and rec room level. Roughly 3,200 square feet in all, with three en suite bedrooms, a wood-burning fireplace, wide-plank hardwood under dark millwork, and a kitchen set around a waterfall marble island with Sub-Zero and Miele, the six-burner range vented. Smart home controls, zoned Sonos, automated shades, updated HVAC and boiler, and the option to buy it furnished. Sixteen homes on seven stories, with an elevator, a bike room, a landscaped roof deck, and a full-time superintendent.

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