87 Leonard Street

87 Leonard Street was assessed as a new building between 1860 and 1863, and the conveyance index names the man who raised it: Jonathan H. Ransom, a merchant. The Landmarks Preservation Commission catalogued it in 1992 as a store and loft, Italianate, masonry with cast-iron elements, five stories, roughly 48 feet wide and 125 feet deep. The architect is recorded as unknown. Two earlier structures stood on the lot first, one of them a masonry store, and both came down to make room for the frontage Ransom wanted.

The record is specific about the trade. Through the 1870s the floors were let to dry goods firms, among them Kobbe and Ball and Jaffe and Pincus, and when the Commission walked the block more than a century later a textile firm was still working in the building. Six bays of window openings per story, paired double-hung wood sash in every one of them, two arcades of smooth-shafted columns on pedestals framing the bays in pairs up the facade, diamond-point quoins running the corners, a metal cornice across the top. It was built to show bolts of cloth by daylight and it has never stopped being good at that.

The ground floor still carries its original cast-iron storefront framing, fluted columns standing on tall pedestals, a modillioned cornice partly intact above them, and arched openings with ornamented spandrels, keystones and imposts in the two eastern bays. The vault in the sidewalk was altered in 1930; diamond plate and iron set with glass lenses survive near the steps. This is the fabric the Tribeca East Historic District was designated to hold, on December 8, 1992, and it is the reason the block reads the way it does from the corner of Church Street.

Alteration was filed in 2014 and the residences began closing in 2016, the work of the developer Magnum Real Estate Group with Grade Architecture and Interior Design. A sixth floor sits back from the street above the original five. The building came back as a condominium with a part-time doorman on an eight in the morning to midnight shift, a fitness center and private storage, and Residence 2 carries a dedicated storage room of its own.

Residence 2 is the whole second floor, 4,652 square feet, four bedrooms, ceilings to 13 feet 4 inches. The great room measures 31 feet 9 inches by 30 feet and the gallery that serves the private rooms runs 38 feet 9 inches. Cast-iron Corinthian columns stand in the open plan under an exposed timber beam, restored and painted dark against wide-plank oak. The kitchen holds an oversized island in marble, a Wolf 48-inch six-burner range under a custom vented hood, a Sub-Zero 48-inch refrigerator, a Sub-Zero wine refrigerator and a Miele dishwasher. North and south exposures on one floor, so the light moves across the plate through the day instead of holding on one wall. The primary bedroom runs 29 by 15 feet with three walk-in closets and a bath of floor-to-ceiling Calacatta Gold marble, vintage herringbone floors and Waterworks fixtures including a 70-inch soaking tub. Ransom built six bays of window to sell cloth by; they now light a living room.