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About The Silk Building, 14 East 4th Street
This very handsome, Italian-Renaissance-palazzo style building was erected in 1908 and converted to a condominium in 1982. The 12-story building has 90 apartments.
One of the larger buildings in this neighborhood, the building occupies the entire south side of the street between Broadway and Lafayette Streets and the leasing of its entire retail spaces to Tower Records in 1983 signaled a new era in the area's retailing and significantly bolstered this area of Broadway to a fever pitch.
While the area had long been servicing the ever-growing student population of nearby New York University, Tower Records became a major destination store in New York and part of its success was due, in no part, to the historic cultural explosion of talent that was being exposed and discovered at the time on MTV, the Music Television channel whose videos by Madonna, Michael Jackson and many others was a short-lived but incredibly dynamic high point of Twentieth Century culture.
In their wonderful tome, "The A. I. A. Guide to New York City, Third Edition," (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), Elliot Willensky and Norval White made the following observations about this store:
"After its California parent company had built three dozen units elsewhere in the world, they were ready to brave New York's rigorous competition. As a result of that courageous full-block-deep decision (noise, music, neon, noise) came the establishment (or at least the stabilization) along Broadway below 8th Street of 'the scene' - the mecca for punk rockers, Mohawk-topped men and Day-Glo-topped young women, both the indigenious variety (Manhattan-based) and the regional emigrants from Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, called Bs & Ts (Bridges & Tunnels)."
The Bridge & Tunnel crowd, of course, had invaded Manhattan and its uptown singles bars many years before, but while Tower's Broadway entrance featured punk and rap and pop, it also had very, very large jazz and classical sections. Tower would subsequently expand uptown and its success would breed rivals such as HMV and Virgin and all would never again quite recapture the early exuberance and thrill of this Tower store, probably because of a general deterioration in the caliber of mega-music stars that began in the late 1980s.
Sadly after a generation of success at the site, the store closed.
The elegant renovation of this handsome building was designed by Buttrick, White & Burtis.
While the Broadway scene at the corner remains confusingly congested and very busy, the midblock entrance and Lafayette Street end are quite calm and this is one of the prime locations in NoHo close to many landmarks, restaurants, boutiques, theaters and the like.
The building has an elegant lobby and concierge, but no garage, no balconies and no sidewalk landscaping.
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