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About 21 Astor Place
This very handsome Romanesque-Revival-style structure was built in 1892 and converted to condominium apartments by The Elad Group in 2003.
H. Thomas O’Hara was the architect for the conversion and Gal Nauer of Nauer Rubenstein designed the layouts.
The 11-story, reddish-beige-brick building has about 50 apartments, half with different individual layouts.
It originally housed the Mercantile Library.
Almost 80 percent of the units are one- and two-bedroom units, ranging in size from 1,187 to 2,182 square feet and 10 of these are duplexes. The building also has eight 3-bedroom apartments including one full floor penthouse, a three-bedroom duplex home of 3,623 square feet and a four-bedroom duplex of 4,275 square feet with initial prices ranging up to $3,250,000. The building’s top floor has 7,278 square feet of interior space and a 3,094-square foot wrap-around terrace and was offered initially “raw” for $8,500,000.
It has arched windows at the second and 7th floors and has a trapezoidal shape. Its façade is strongly articulated with dark string concourses at the third and 7th floors and lighter ones at the fourth and eighth floors.
Its narrow western façade faces Cooper Union and St. Mark’s Place, the western extension of 8th Street to the west of Third Avenue.
Many of the apartments have brick walls and fireplaces.
This is one of the city’s most bustling locations and on the border between Greenwich Village and the East Village. New York University has many nearby facilities to the east and the area has numerous restaurants including Indochine on Lafayette Street and the fabled McSorley’s Tavern nearby on East 7th Street.
While there are many wonderful older buildings nearby, most notably the beautiful Grace Episcopal Church two blocks north on Broadway, the area also has some new construction and a striking, free-standing residential tower designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates with curved, glass facades was erected not long after this building was converted diagonally across Lafayette Street.
Cooper Union decided to erect a new academic building across from McSorley's designed by Morphosis and in 2008 it announced that its engineering building just to the north of its historic main building would be redeveloped by Edward Minskoff with a design by Fumihiko Maki.
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