Carter's Review

This light pink-brick, 8-story building has 16 rental apartments at 159 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and once contained the Bleecker Street Playhouse late-run cinema theater, then the 600-seat Luxor Theater that become the well-known Amato Opera and then the Circle-In-The-Square Theater that subsequently became The Market NYC, a collective of artisan shops.

It is between Thompson and Sullivan Streets.

The mid-block building was enlarged in 2006 from a two-story theater building by Emmut Properties of which John Young was a principal and also the architect.

The mid-block building is directly across Bleecker Street from the imposing Atrium apartment house that was originally Mills House, an apartment hotel designed by Ernest Flagg in 1896 for Darius O. Mills that originally contained about 750 bedrooms in each of the two wings that were separated “by an elaborately modeled and boldly scaled frontispiece set between the two blocks at the entrance on Bleecker Street,” noted Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and John Massengale in their great book, ‘New York 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890-1915” (Rizzoli International Publications, 1983). 

The building is also across the street from another theater that used to house Art d’Lugoff’s Village Gate, one of the city’s important jazz venues. 

A block and a half to the west on Bleecker Street was the famous Figaro coffee house on Macdougal Street and Washington Square Park is one block to the north.

Bottom Line

A prominent mid-rise building on one of Greenwich Village’s busiest streets that was expanded over the famous, closed Off-Broadway Circle in the Square Theater.

Description

The building has a light-pink brick façade above its two-story red-brick retail façade that features a large, angled marquee just to the east of the building’s very attractive black, multi-paned windowed entrance. 

The retail spaces include 4,304 square feet on the ground floor with high ceilings, 1,557 square feet in a lower mezzanine, 1,557 square feet in an upper mezzanine and 1,438 square feet in the basement.

Amenities

The building has a roof deck, a doorman, storage, and a laundry room on every floor.

Apartments

The apartments range in size from about 630 square feet with one-and-a-half baths to more than about 1,025 square feet with six-and-a-half-rooms and two baths.

A one-bedroom unit has a 16-foot-long living room with an enclosed kitchen and a 500-square-foot-terrace.

Another one-bedroom unit has a 16-foot-long living room with an enclosed kitchen and a 106-square-foot balcony.

History

In a May 13, 2007 article in The New York Times Josh Barbanel wrote an article that reported that in October, 2006 the “developer filed a restrictive declaration promising to turn over six apartments” in the building to the Dalton School “for use as a student dormitory.”

“The document surfaced when the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation began looking into how the apartment building, constructed atop a two-story structure that once housed the Circle in the Square Theater, had gotten permission to be so tall and bulky.  It towers over the small tenements surrounding it and has balconies that extend over the street.  The building, it learned, received a bonus allowing it to be built large, often up to 20 percent larger, in exchange for providing ‘community facilities’ - space for doctor’s offices, schools or dormitories – under a provision of the zoning code.  When the preservation group objected, the Department of Buildings held up occupancy of the building.  But the agency reversed itself and issued a temporary certificate of occupancy, after the developer promised that the units would be used as a Dalton student dormitory….But Andrew Berman, the preservation society’s executive director, said that when he checked with Dalton he was told the apartments would be used for faculty housing, a use he said was prohibited under zoning-code changes designed to eliminate abuses by developments.”

A July 15, 2007 article by Mr. Barbanel noted that the preservationists convinced the Department of Buildings to order that the building’s four-foot-deep balconies be only 22 inches deep.  “Lounge-chair-sized balconies will be have to be trimmed to a size befitting a Juliet looking down on her Romeo,” Mr. Barbanel gushed.