66 Leonard Street #12D

In 1900, Henry J. Hardenbergh stood between his two most famous buildings. The Dakota was sixteen years behind him and the Plaza Hotel was seven years ahead when he took a commission downtown: a twelve-story showroom building for the Importer's Building Company at the corner of Leonard and Church, raised by the George A. Fuller Company, the contractor that would soon build the Flatiron.

It opened as the Importer's Building and filled with the offices and showrooms of dry goods firms, since these blocks were then the center of New York's textile trade. The name that stuck was the Textile Building, and Hardenbergh dressed the Neo-Renaissance facade for the part, with eight large cartouches and six reliefs of the caduceus, the winged staff of Mercury. Modern eyes read the caduceus as medical iconography, but it is the emblem of the god of commerce. The architect of the Plaza was announcing, in stone, exactly what his building was for.

Apartment 12D holds the building's southeast corner on the twelfth floor, about 1,780 square feet arranged as two bedrooms with two full baths and a powder room. Nine windows run along the south and east walls, and most of them serve the great room, a single space of roughly twenty-nine by twenty feet with a fireplace set into one corner. On a corner this high in a low-slung stretch of Tribeca, the light arrives from two directions at once and stays most of the day.

The renovated kitchen opens to the great room and carries a built-in bar, so the whole floor lives as one continuous entertaining space. Both bedrooms are en suite, and there is a dedicated laundry room, the kind of back-of-house practicality these loft conversions rarely spare the square footage for.

Developer Yitzchak Tessler converted the Textile Building to condominiums in 1999, with designs by Karl Fischer and Alan Ritchie and a duplex penthouse added at the top. The conversion kept the trade in the walls. The elevator doors are embossed with weaving-machine motifs, and the lobby displays antique American textiles, so the commute from street to apartment passes through a small museum of what the building used to do.

The resident register is genuinely strong. Toni Morrison bought apartment 10A, two floors below this one, in 2014, converted its third bedroom into a writing room and library that held a Mark Twain collection, and kept it as her New York home until her death in 2019. Before her, chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten owned a unit here from 2001, selling it in 2004 to the Japanese pop star Hiromi Go. Two decades of the building's deed history reads like a short account of Tribeca's rise.

The building anchors its corner within the Tribeca East Historic District, designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in December 1992 to protect the store-and-loft architecture the dry goods trade left behind. Leonard Street remains one of the district's quietest and most intact blocks, cast iron and masonry fronts running toward Broadway.

That is the setting the twelfth floor looks out over: a protected low-rise fabric to the south and east, which is why the corner light here behaves the way it does. The trade that built these streets is long gone, but its buildings, this one first among them, are the reason people want to live on them now.

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