96 Grand Street

The SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District designation report of 1973 carries 96-98 Grand Street as entry 474-22: commenced 1868, architect B. W. Warner, original owner Elliot Cowdin, original function store and loft, facade marble, ashlar and iron, five stories with an attic, six bays. The same page lists 100-102 Grand under the same architect, the same owner and the same year, with the note that the two share a joint facade. Cowdin was building a matched pair.

Elliot Christopher Cowdin, born in Jamaica, Vermont, in 1819, came to New York in 1852 to set up Elliot C. Cowdin and Company, importers of ribbons, silks, flowers and other Paris novelties, with a branch office in Paris where he kept a second home. He helped found the Union League Club, sat in the New York Chamber of Commerce, and served a term in the State Assembly in 1877. The Grand Street pair went up in the same year as his marble-faced 114 Franklin Street, also by Warner, at the height of the decade when this block filled in: six of its nine buildings date from the 1860s, and the corner building at 90-94 Grand was completed the year before by Griffith Thomas for the publisher D. Appleton and Company.

The city's lot record, Block 474 Lot 24, gives the building fifty feet of frontage and eighty-seven of depth, six floors today, nine residential units, and an alteration year of 2008. It also gives a year built of 1868, agreeing with the Commission. The building is a co-op, and the penthouse is its whole top floor.

A private keyed elevator opens into 3,750 square feet under twelve skylights. The great room runs about fifty feet, which is the width of the lot, over solid oak floors stepped into platforms that separate the sitting area from the dining area without a wall between them. The original brick is painted white; the windows are steel-framed; a marble bar sits under one of the skylights. The kitchen has custom Corian cabinetry and a central island with bar seating. A den, a skylit office that the floor plan offers as a fourth bedroom, and a powder room complete the public side. The private wing holds the primary suite on the corner, with oak millwork, a dressing room, radiant floors, a soaking tub and a glass-enclosed shower, plus two guest bedrooms and two full baths, and a laundry room.

An oak stair with a slatted screen climbs to a glazed pavilion on the roof and a landscaped terrace of about 2,200 square feet: stone pavers, planted beds, long dining tables, and an outdoor kitchen with basalt counters, built-in refrigeration and a Kalamazoo dishwasher. The view runs from One World Trade to the Chrysler Building. The record put a silk importer's store and loft here in 1868. The roof is what the record could not have foreseen.

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