My husband and I have long lived in a converted early 20th-century cold-storage warehouse in the Far West Village. When we arrived in 1989, less than a decade after the residential conversion, our super told us the building once stored spices. It’s a charming idea, seeing as how Nabisco used to have multiple factories in the vicinity, one of them right next door. But I can’t find an iota of evidence to support the theory.
What did go on inside these mighty bones that have sheltered us so well for so long, with brick walls so thick that the weather inside the apartment lags a day or two behind the weather outside? I’ve driven myself a little nuts lately trying to find out. Turns out the building holds its history as close as it holds the weather.
I’ve long known that the building’s architect of record was James Lawrence Aspinwall (1854-1936), a proper Victorian in a three-piece tweed suit with cravat and pocket watch. (I love the fact that Aspinwall was architect of record for another Village building dear to my heart: the much grander Carmine Rec Center—renamed in 2004 for Tony Dapolito, longtime member of the local community board and local bakery owner)—with its arched windows and Guastavino vaulted ceilings. Sadly, the building is under threat of demolition.)
Aspinwall’s partner was James Renwick Jr. (1818-1895), a cousin through marriage. Renwick also happens to be one of the most famous architects of his time (though it appears he didn’t have an architecture degree, which may be why Aspinwall’s stamp appears on so many blueprints). Even if you don’t know Renwick’s name, you know his work: St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Grace Church, the Vassar campus, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
Our building, now an exemplary example of adaptive reuse, is pretty unassuming on the outside. It was originally two contiguous buildings, the first dating to 1898. During the conversion the entire brick façade was covered over with Dryvit, a synthetic stucco that also insulates. The building needed insulation, and the developer, David Puchkoff, covered the exterior brick in the interest of saving the interior brick, which I think was wise. Right now I’m sitting in my small work space surrounded by two warm brick walls and a deep brick window sill.
Our building does have a distinguishing exterior feature, but you have to look up to see it: two adjacent stepped parapet lines, like old Dutch gables. That silhouette led me to an uncanny discovery.
When the first segment of the High Line, the elevated freight railroad that stopped running trains in 1980, was converted to a linear park in June 2009, I happened to notice a large brick building on the north side of 20th Street just west of the High Line that looked familiar: a façade with proportions reminiscent of ours topped by a stepped parapet line. I went home and did a little digging. Sure enough: Renwick Aspinwall & Tucker. (The firm was created in 1883 and lasted until Aspinwall’s death in 1936, though Renwick died in 1895. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a junior partner at the firm: they churned through third names).
There was more, and it was disturbing. One day not long after we had moved into our building, the super pointed to a horizontal iron bar above the first-floor façade. It had been painted over, but he showed me that you could still make out a ghostly outline that read BAKER AND WILLIAMS.
I like coincidences, and sometimes I imagine them where they don’t exist. Well, come to find out, the building at 20th Street had been part of the main Baker and Williams warehouse complex, three large buildings that span most of that block. However, in the 1940s those buildings stored products about as far from spices as you can get: radioactive materials for the Manhattan project. In the 80s the buildings underwent a major remediation, were declared safe, and now house offices and galleries. I’ve looked a fair amount but can find no evidence that our branch of Baker and Williams had anything to do with that, thank heaven.
To try to learn more about our building I picked the brains of two original residents who still live here. Both told me that fur storage was likely. Hearing this from two different people doesn’t make it more likely to be true, though: one may have told the other, or the same person may have told them both. Both believed there were at least a few offices, because several wood-burning stoves had been left behind; apparently one early resident had kept one of them. Further speculation supplied a few bathrooms or at least urinals.
They told me about elevators big enough for trucks to drive right in from the street, and a first-floor track and pulley system to haul goods in and out. There are indeed some large vestigial iron rings protruding from the façade. One described a floor system made of long terra cotta tiles with deep gullies (which I imagined like corrugated cardboard on a grand scale), which seemed odd, but too specific to be merely a rumor.
The original tenant who lives on the first floor and is a designer with a lot of architectural know-how also talked up the unusual solidity of the building, with its double I-beams one atop the other to double the payload. And he told me that his post-Superstorm Sandy demolition got delayed significantly when workers lifted the hard-wood floors from the 1980s and found three inches of mucky tar.
I then tracked down the project manager for the conversion, now in Florida. He and his family were the original owners of our unit. They then moved to a bigger apartment across the hall and were our good neighbors for many years. He told me he believed the building had been a bonded warehouse, which I gather means it was a place to stash goods to avoid paying duty fees and to await better market conditions.
He confirmed the story about the terra cotta drainage system: a six-inch downward pitch from the front of the building to the back. He could not, however, explain why a cold-storage warehouse would need such a system. He also confirmed the tar: “The flooring was asphalt. I never saw this in any other building.” But he nixed the offices, and said that trucks could definitely not drive in from the street, though there were indeed two huge elevators.
When I was deep in my rabbit hole and quite frustrated, my designer neighbor forwarded me some pure gold: the 1898 building plans. This was the first of the two buildings; the other was erected immediately to the east, closer to Washington Street, some years later. The walls between them were tunneled through during the conversion. The floor plates still don’t fully line up: our hallway has a slope, and there’s a step up into our apartment.
I eagerly printed the 49 pages. I squealed when I saw the fancy copperplate signature of J. Lawrence Aspinwall himself, as well as pages from a somewhat testy back and forth between him and the Department of Buildings about overcoming the building’s loading “eccentricity.” “Awaiting the filing of details showing the floor construction,” says one DoB letter. “The weight given, 35 pounds, appears totally insufficient.”
To find plans for the other half of the building I’ll probably have to book an appointment at DoB. Even the project manager, whose memories are remarkably fresh, isn’t sure how much later the second building was built. He did tell me that when they went to cut additional windows (to supplement the meager two per floor of the original contiguous warehouses), one of the buildings had mortar so solid that a pneumatic hammer couldn’t make a dent and they had to saw cut the openings. The other one’s mortar was so compromised that they could pull out the bricks by hand.
I also don’t know when the buildings were abandoned, though I’m told they were cleaned out and in decent condition when purchased around 1980. I have combed through the wonderfully detailed resource known as fire insurance maps, or Sanborn maps (though not all of them were published by Sanborn), new versions of which came out on an irregular schedule, from 1879 up to 1955. Other than the tantalizing “U.S. GOV’T LIQUOR ST’GE” from the 1947 map, however, they reveal nothing to speak of about our building, except that at some point it passed into the hands of a storage company called Hubert.
They do paint a vivid picture of evolving 20th-century industry. The former property on West Street that’s now the Robert A. M. Stern-designed Superior tower was listed as the American Biscuit Manufacturing Company in 1893; Nabisco in 1921; Bell Telephone Labs in 1930; John S. Swift Co. in 1955, a printing company that still exists. After that I can supply what was likely its next incarnation, because I remember it: Superior Ink.
Also within a block of our building over the decades: a distilled water company, the American Can Company, a wagon yard, a “planing and moulding mill,” an “old iron yard,” and the “American Distributing Company: Rectifying Spirits.” (AI tells me that rectifiers buy bulk spirits and wines to blend, flavor, or bottle them into unique products without performing the raw fermentation themselves.)
I’ve solved a few mysteries, but will probably never know the whole story of my home. I’m sticking with my second-favorite theory after spices: beaver pelts, which used to be a hot commodity for export. Maybe even, according to a rumor one of the old-timers heard once from who knows whom, beaver pelts belonging to Lady Astor.
