55 White Street

The Landmarks Preservation Commission made 55 White Street an individual New York City Landmark on March 22, 1988, Designation List 202, LP-1651, the landmark site recorded as Block 175, Lot 25. The hearing that January ran twenty-eight witnesses in favour and nine against, which is the arithmetic of a fight that had begun in the summer of 1986 over a tower proposed for the roof. The tower was never built.

Four years later the building was written in again, this time inside the Tribeca East Historic District, designated December 8, 1992. The entry reads 55-57 White Street, also known as 6-8 Franklin Place, tax lots 1201 through 1218 on Block 175. It dates the building from the Tax Assessment Records of 1861, names John Kellum & Son as architect and Daniel D. Badger as the foundry, and files it as a store and loft, Italianate, five storeys. StreetEasy’s building record says 1860. The Commission and the city’s own lot file both say 1861.

Cousins John Eliot Condict and Samuel H. Condict commissioned it in 1861 as a store and warehouse for their saddlery business, which kept a factory in Newark and imported hardware besides. Two earlier buildings came down to make room, one of them masonry. White Street had opened in 1806 as a quiet residential street of Federal and Greek Revival houses, and by 1861 it was the spine of Manhattan’s dry goods trade, rebuilt in stone and iron with plate glass shopfronts of the kind that put the phrase window shopping into circulation.

The Condict firm stayed for years. Textile tenants followed, a drapery manufacturer and then a house of cotton jobbers and converters. A fire in 1922 took the interiors; the iron front wanted new windows and a coat of paint. Directly across the street, the Woods Mercantile Buildings of 1865 are landmarks too.

Inside, 1,989 square feet arranged as a corner loft. The great room is 675 of them, under 11 foot ceilings, with oversized multi-pane windows, a wood-burning fireplace at one end and the building’s original structural cast-iron Corinthian columns standing in the room. Three exposures. Three bedrooms, two marble bathrooms, the primary en suite with four fixtures and a Jacuzzi tub, the second with a soaking tub. An open kitchen with GE and Bosch appliances, central HVAC, a vented washer dryer, and a walk-in closet off the primary with room beside the bed for a chair or a desk.

Sixteen apartments in the building, a key-locked elevator, a virtual doorman, a full-time superintendent, bicycle and storage rooms, and a landscaped common roof deck. The loft came to market once before, in 2017, and the record of that attempt ends without a sale.