Charlton Street between Varick Street and 6th Avenue

A Shrine of Covet

By David Crohn

The Bible says it’s bad to covet things. I’ve always assumed that’s not because of the harm you can inflict on your object but rather the way envy can handicap your judgment or screw up a perfectly nice stroll downtown.

Well, the Bible never tried sharing a one-bedroom, illegally converted Greenpoint storefront with his coke-snorting former college roommate. Or walked along Charlton Street between Varick Street and 6th Avenue.

With its whistle-clean stoops and breezy elegance, this is a shrine of covet. To the Things You Will Never Have. Hardcore real estate porn.

And I suspect some of the people who live there like it that way. How else to explain the way in which one woman sat, in the middle of her luxuriously appointed living room, laptop splayed open, windows wantonly flung open with curtains pushed aside, the light of early afternoon pouring in? And to think, she flashed me a dirty look when my neck went rubber and I peered in as I ambled by.

This immodest woman lives on the north side of the street, in one of a long row of homes that provide the perfect primer on Federal Architecture. So named because it was born during the late 18th century, Federal Architecture was “the first of our new republic,” says the “AIA Guide to New York City.” “Dignified and restrained, it emphasized geometric form and harmonious proportion and was executed in both wood and masonry.”

Inside, the homes are stately and bright, the epitome of what can only be called high class.

The southern side of the block isn’t as luscious as the northern side—which is a little like saying Veuve Clicquot tastes better than Dom Perignon. The Elisabeth Irwin High School, which boasts Robert De Niro and former “Nation” editor Victor Navasky as alums, sits here, in a large building with an ornate and very collegiate façade. On the southeast side of the block are several old townhouses of the kind that are a common site in the best-preserved parts of Greenwich Village and SoHo.
But no matter how often I pass the townhouses downtown, and the two- and three-story homes on the north side of the street, I still salivate when I see them, and I often have to temper my envy with rhetorical thanks that I do not live in Greenpoint anymore.

Renting and Buying
The only listings to be found on this block right now are at 2 Charlton Street, the large box that is uncharacteristic of the historic beauty of the rest of this block. Charlton House, as it’s known, has studios starting at $1,575. In lieu of regality or style, it has in-house laundry facilities and 24-hour doorman service. There are two one-bedrooms for sale: one for $785,000, and the other for $889,000. If, on the other hand, you have the dough and don’t mind waiting for the opportunity, expect to pay millions for one of those Federal-style homes on the northern half of the block.

What Happened Here
Often when we talk about historical places downtown, we are talking about the history of the city itself. Not here. At the corner of Varick and Charlton Streets once stood Richmond Hill, a colonial mansion built in 1767 that served as the military headquarters for George Washington when he was commander of the Revolutionary Army. Vice President John Adams and Aaron Burr slept there. According to NYSonglines.com, in 1831 Richmond Hill was converted into a theater that featured Isaac Van Amburgh, an early pioneer of the circus, um, arts. Legend has it he was the first to stick his head in a lion’s mouth. The culmination of his act was to make a lamb lie down with a lion—a riff on the Book of Isaiah, in which the lamb actually gets with a wolf, but same diff. The theater was demolished in 1849.

Amenities
None, which is not entirely a bad thing. The length, architectural uniformity (on one side) and dearth of commercial establishments on this block give it the feeling of an enclosed mini-district, kind of like housing projects in Utopia. There is a high-end deli at the southeast corner of the block, as well as a bodegaesque mini-grocery nearby on 6th Avenue. Keep heading west on Charlton, through MacDougal Street, and the sudden shrinkage of the buildings and narrowing of the street herald your entrance into SoHo proper, which is Amenity Central.

Mercer Street between Spring Street and Broome Street

Safe as Warehouses
By David Crohn

When city officials established the easy-to-navigate grid system of streets in 1811, they stopped at Houston Street. I take that to mean that the fact that the neighborhood South of Houston is composed of even squares and rectangles is a happy accident. But that’s also why Wooster, Greene and Mercer St. begin at E. Houston Street and end at Canal, without lining up with any streets north or south. They exist only here. From a geographical perspective, this is what makes SoHo so self-contained.
That, and the architecture, all Italianate facades, and baby townhouses that are a common sight in the countryside and in postcards but remarkable in any urban locale.
This week, I managed to find perhaps the one block in SoHo that’s comparatively dreary. Greene has its frills and Prince its Apple Store. On Mercer Street between Spring and Broome, however, it’s mostly warehouses. But in a neighborhood loaded with red-brick, well-maintained warehouses, this block has my favorite: the Rosenbluth Bros. building, at 84 through 94 Mercer St. It’s bigger and older than me, it will be there when I die or move away, and important things go on inside. The sign’s typeface is exquisite. (Sporting goods are sold from the ground floor storefront, but it’s easy enough to look past this prosaic detail.)
A young laborer was buffing graffiti off a small segment of my warehouse’s exterior when I strolled by. Watching this was like watching a natty giant lay back and get a manicure.
The Rosenbluth building also quietly hides a conundrum in plain sight. It has 14 columns of windows across but only one set of fire escapes servicing the middle four. So what are you supposed to do, God forbid, in the event of a fire if you are on either end? Do people still use fire escapes, except to grab a quick smoke or drop water balloons on passersby? I asked the warehouse. It stood silent.
What Happened Here
The neighborhood was once known as Hell’s Hundred Acres, because the warehouses were filled with flammable materials, no one payed attention, and the city’s fire men were little more than gangsters with trucks and buckets. The zero hour for modern-day SoHo is 1974, when the city passed the Loft Law, which allowed those huge lofts to be zoned residential, and thus paved the way for artists to move in and have a cheap place to live and work. According to a recent exhibition at a downtown gallery that took stock of the lower Manhattan arts scene in its heyday, this era ended in 1984—the year Ronald Reagan was reelected. Rents skyrocketed, Starbucks paved the sky, the moon turned to blood, blah blah blah.
Renting
The artists sold out and moved to Brooklyn and elsewhere, but no one bothered to subdivide those huge lofts. So there’s still plenty of space to live and work. Like at one apartment we found, at Spring and Mercer and listed by Knickerbocker Village, Inc. It’s a 950-square-foot one-bedroom with a full-sized separate kitchen, a walk-in closet, even a big, human-body-sized tub. $5,500 per month.
Buying
This block seems quieter than most in SoHo, but not for long. The sights—scaffolding everywhere, debris from gutted ground floors spewing into the street—and sounds—hum of drills and clangs of moving steel—of construction are rife. Those new projects may some day look like 72 Mercer, a recently renovated building at Broome with condos available ranging from $3.23 million to $3.45. Since you can still actually score a condo in SoHo for a hair under a million, that seems excessive. Those are one-bedrooms. Double the bedrooms, and it’s triple the price and then some. So goes the funky algebra of downtown real estate.
Residents and Regulars
Claire Danes lives a block away. She’s one of those people who perpetually begs the question, Has she been in anything lately?
Amenities
No grocery stores nearby, but it is charge card heaven. Helen Wang, Ugg, Kate Spade—God knows what those shops sell; all I can do is read the signs and report back. But there is a cocktail lounge, called Bar 89, on this block. I know what they sell: Martinis, lots of martinis, in all the primary colors.
dcrohn@gmail.com