81 Wooster Street

On the ground floor of this building, in a room roughly 45 by 125 feet lit like a stadium, stand 500 polished brass rods, each two meters long, laid in five parallel rows of 100. Walter De Maria's The Broken Kilometer has been installed there since 1979, commissioned and maintained by the Dia Art Foundation, open to the public free of charge. The loft for sale sits four floors above it.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission transcribed the original new building application for this lot: commenced 22 April 1889, completed 24 January 1890, architect Jno. B. Snook and Sons, original owner Jacob Lorillard Trustees, original function warehouse. Snook had designed the first Grand Central depot in 1871 and renamed his firm around 1887, when two of his sons joined the practice. Between 1867 and 1890 the Lorillard tobacco family rebuilt most of this block and kept Snook for every building of their own on it. This was the last of them.

Despite the name of the historic district it stands in, the facade is not cast iron. It is red brick banded with rusticated stone on the end piers and window pilasters, with rusticated sills and lintels, round arched windows along the sixth floor, and cast iron only at the shopfront. The commission read the composition as "somewhat Romanesque in feeling."

The lot is 55 feet wide and just over 200 feet deep, and the building fills it from West Broadway through to Wooster Street. That is why unit letters here end in WB, WM or WO. #5WO is the Wooster end of the fifth floor: three bedrooms, three baths, a private elevator that opens directly into the loft, six oversized windows facing east over the cobblestones and three more facing north. Tin ceilings and maple floors remain. The broker puts the loft at roughly 5,000 square feet. The asking price is 5,250,000 dollars.

The co-op took title in January 1975, from the Wasserstein family, who had acquired the building in 1968 from Levolor Lorentzen Inc. The legal residential conversion followed a decade later, in 1985. The corporation still owns the one story garage lot next door at 395 West Broadway. Across the street, 80 Wooster Street remains on the city rolls under Fluxhouse Corp #2, the building George Maciunas assembled in 1967 and the one usually credited as the first artists' co-op in Soho. It is directly across from these east windows. Maintenance is 7,900 dollars a month, taxes included, and the building is pet friendly.