90 Franklin Street

New Building 646 of 1929, Block 175, Lot 10. The application is for a seventeen-story office building at the northeast corner of Church and Franklin Streets, roughly seventy-five feet along each, steel-framed and fireproof, for the Centrun Corporation, a subsidiary of the Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company. Architects, Cross and Cross. Builders, Marc Eidlitz and Son. Work ran through 1930 and 1931, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation report for the Tribeca East Historic District reads the result as it still stands: brick facades nine bays wide on each street, chevron-patterned spandrels and ornamental brickwork at the three centre bays, the ornament thickening above the fifteenth story into a brick parapet, a limestone base on a granite water table, and paired bronze doors on Church Street with Art Deco geometry cut into the stone around them.

Cross and Cross were the brothers John Walter Cross and Eliot Cross, and 1931 was their year. The RCA Victor Building at 570 Lexington Avenue, the Gothic-crowned tower now called the General Electric Building, was finished in the same months as this one, and the City Bank-Farmers Trust tower at 20 Exchange Place followed. Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue came in 1940. Here the bank took the first story for itself and let showrooms and offices above. The building replaced a five-story cast-iron front, and the same architects and builders put up a sister for the same corporation at 335-337 Greenwich Street, now inside the Tribeca West district.

The city's record carries a single alteration date, 2000, which is when the offices became lofts: twenty-four residences under building class RM, one to a floor from the eleventh story up, and the address turned to face Franklin Street. The LPC adds that Franklin Street was Sugar Loaf Street once, for the sugar refineries that worked the blocks around it, before it was renamed for the statesman.

The record arrives at the twelfth floor as 5,027 square feet on a single plate, and the plate is the point. Three of its four corners are free, so there are windows on every side, twenty-eight of them, black-framed and set deep in the brick, and where two walls meet in the living room the skyline turns the corner without a break. Boxed beams cross the ceiling over wood floors. Five bedrooms and four and a half baths, a dining room open to a stainless steel kitchen with an island under pendant lights, a den with upholstered walls, a dressing room fitted floor to ceiling, and a corner room kept as a painting studio with the easel at the window. The tower keeps a full-time doorman, a gym, a bicycle room and a roof deck planted with birches in steel boxes, from which Tribeca's rooftops and the towers beyond go orange at dusk. The penthouse has been Mariah Carey's since 1999. The filing said offices. The floor says otherwise.

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