60 Beach Street

Arched windows on three sides, one living and dining room running the length of the window wall, and 2,297 square feet reached by an elevator that opens into the apartment's own foyer. The four columns down the middle are structural steel, painted gloss black because the architects decided not to hide them.

The building is older than the listing panel says. Corcoran's own data field reads 1930. The city's tax record and the Landmarks Preservation Commission both read 1905, and so does the paragraph at the bottom of Corcoran's own listing. The Commission's file is exact: No. 48-60 Beach Street, new building application 978 of 1905, Block 188, Lot 16. Architect, Charles C. Haight. Owner and developer, the Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Religion and Learning in the State of New York. Builder, A.J. Robinson Co. Type, warehouse. Six storeys, 151 feet wide, masonry with iron and steel supports, neo-Renaissance. It replaced seven three-storey dwellings.

Haight was not a warehouse architect. He built most of Columbia College's old campus on Madison Avenue, a long list of buildings at Yale, and the master plan of the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea. He was the Episcopal church's architect, working mostly in collegiate Gothic. He got the Beach Street job the way such jobs are got: his father was a rector of Trinity Church, Trinity had granted the land to the Society, and Haight sat on the Society's Board of Directors. He designed four warehouses for them on this one block, 55-57 North Moore in 1890, this one in 1905, 129-133 Hudson in 1910, and 125-127 Hudson in 1912.

What the Commission describes at the sidewalk is still there. Rounded arches with granite bases framing the loading bays, the two centre bays bricked in with paired arches and bull's-eyes above them, and a stepped vault in front of the base that rises to loading-platform height at the west end because the ground falls away. Above that, segmentally-arched windows, two bays of Palladian groups to break up the 151 feet, an attic storey of closely-set flat-headed windows, and a crenelated parapet that steps up where the elevator bulkheads come through.

The Society leased the building to the Varick Warehouse Company on a long-term lease negotiated while it was going up. Coastwise Warehouses, Inc. came later. General merchandise, for most of a century.

The street belongs to the record too. Beach Street was repaved with granite in 1928, and the Commission noted in 1991 that most of that paving and the granite curbs were still exposed. They still are. The name has never been settled. The Vestry of Trinity Church wrote it Beach in 1790, after Abraham Beach, made assistant minister of the parish in 1784. The Common Council wrote it Bache in 1802, after the Bache family, whose patriarch Theophylact Bache ran the Chamber of Commerce. A Bache genealogist records that the name came from the French de la Beche and was said as Beach regardless.

The warehousing stopped. The city logs alterations in 1985 and again in 2007, and the building came out of the second one as twenty-five apartments on seven floors, one floor more than Haight drew.

Apartment 6A has been published. Interior Design ran it in September 2012 as "Harmonic Conversion: Sara Story Transforms a TriBeCa Loft". Dirk Denison Architects, who brought Sara Story in for the interiors, working for an owner the magazine describes as a bachelor and an art aficionado. Denison gutted it. It had been rented for years, and he calls what he found a complete warren. Instead of the developer's three-bedroom plan he made a primary suite and a den, hung two sliding doors from factory ceiling tracks and had one clad in patinated zinc, and painted the structural columns high-gloss black rather than trying to make them disappear.

The powder room from that article is still here and still in the photographs. Claret shelves, rows of small labelled bottles, after Damien Hirst's pharmacy vitrines. Fourteen years on, nobody has painted over it.

The rest reads plainly. Elevator into a foyer with closets. Living and dining as one room along the windows, the kitchen behind an island with a walk-in pantry, Wolf, Sub-Zero and Miele. A powder room off the living space. A rear hall deep enough to work in. The primary bedroom at one end, a dressing room between it and a bath with two vanities, a soaking tub and a separate water closet. The second bedroom behind retractable doors, with a built-in desk and its own full bath. A laundry room with a side-by-side washer and dryer. Wide-plank European white oak throughout, Venetian plaster, exposed brick, Crestron for light and temperature and sound, and a deeded storage unit in the basement.

The building keeps a 24-hour doorman and concierge, a live-in superintendent, a gym with the children's playroom visible from it, a bike room, resident storage, a pet spa, and a roof deck. The roof deck is common; the apartment has no outdoor space of its own.