56 East 11th Street #5

On the south side of East 11th Street between University Place and Broadway, a nine-story brick loft building holds eight homes, one per floor, above a ground-floor storefront. It went up circa 1900, as this corridor filled with loft and light-manufacturing buildings, and it belongs to a row whose paperwork is unusually well kept. Village Preservation attributes the neighbor at 58 East 11th to Farnsworth and Miller and the pair at 60 through 66 to Louis Korn, while the record stays quiet on who drew No. 56.

The format is the rare part. A key-locked elevator opens directly into each residence, so the building runs less like an apartment house than a stack of eight private floors. Building marketing dates the co-op conversion to 1988, and offerings here surface rarely; this one found its buyer in about a month and a half.

The home is a two-bedroom, two-bath loft that spans its entire floor. The listing describes ceilings of nearly eleven feet, exposed brick, and a run of oversized windows, the kind of proportions this row was given when daylight was an industrial requirement rather than an amenity. Hardwood floors, central air, and an in-unit washer and dryer bring the working systems current.

The primary suite takes both a soaking tub and a separate shower. In the building itself, recent capital work noted in the listing covers the lobby, the elevator, and the boiler, the three things a small full-floor co-op actually depends on.

The block sits inside Village Preservation's proposed South of Union Square historic district, a campaign running since 2018 to protect roughly 200 buildings between Ninth and 14th Streets, Third Avenue to Fifth. The city declined the full district and designated only ten individual buildings, so this stretch of 1890s lofts remains unlandmarked, its history carried by the buildings themselves.

The corridor's first act was photography. In January 1896 the Scovill and Adams Company, publisher of The Photographic Times, moved in two doors east at 60 through 62, at a moment when this stretch ranked among the world centers of the photomaking trade. Rows like this one were glazed generously because that work ran on daylight.

The second act was print. Directly across the street at 53 East 11th, Grove Press, Barney Rosset's censorship-fighting publisher of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, kept offices and its own small theater for films and live productions from around 1967. At the Broadway corner, the former Hotel St. Denis had hosted Lincoln, Grant, and Mark Twain, and held Marcel Duchamp's studio until 1967.

Diagonally across, the Cast Iron Building at 67 East 11th nearly met the wrecking ball before its 1970s residential conversion, the save that set the citywide precedent for turning cast-iron lofts into homes. Few blocks this short carry that much of the city's record, and fewer still do it without a plaque.

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