37 East 12th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 37 East 12th Street by Carter Horsley

This gorgeous 1896 Century commercial building at 37 East 12^th Street in the East Village between University Place and Broadway was converted to 6 condominium apartments in 2014 by Edward J. Minskoff Equities, who recently completed a major office building just to the north of the nearby Cooper Union.

The 8-story building has a 3-level “townhouse” unit, a duplex penthouse and four floor-through units.

CS Architects designed the conversion and Haland & Haland did the interiors.

It is convenient to Union Square Park, Washington Square Park, and good transportation.

Bottom Line

With one of the city’s most sensational commercial building façades from the end of the 19^th Century, this mid-block building in the East Village is just as beautiful inside with multipane-glass-enclosed kitchens and barrel-vaulted ceilings.

Description

This 8-story, beige-brick, midblock building between University Place and Broadway is extravagantly ornate.

It has a very detailed and decorative, two-story base and a very handsome top floor with deeply inset arched windows beneath a good, strong cornice.  According to Andrew Berman, the head of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, “the lacy ironwork covering the first and second floors is quite striking, and highly unusual.”

But it really shines in its middle where a three-story-high set of decorative frames is divided by a substantial center column and the multipane windows have dentilated sills beneath an even more dentilated bandcourse that that supports the four nicely pedimented windows on the sixth floor.

The notion of framing, of course, is central to architecture, and to art galleries and for part of its existence this building was Lenard’s, an auction house, and for many years later it was the Kentshire Gallery.  In the 1940s and 1950s, the University Place/Broadway corridor between 8^th and 13^th Street was one of the city’s premier auction house districts with such notable establishments as Astor, Lawner’s and Kalisky & Gabay doing major business in the days before the dominance of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, uptown enterprises.

Amenities

The building has a 24-hour concierge, a fitness center and storage.

Apartments

The duplex penthouse has 6,325 square feet and 1,188 feet of exterior space.  It has four bedrooms.

The townhouse triplex has 5,886 square feet with a 10-foot-long entry foyer and a 14-foot-long gallery on the second floor with three bedrooms, a 9-foot-long study, 16-foot-high barrel vaulted ceilings and a fireplace and two dressing rooms.  The first floor has a 26-foot-long, angled private garden and a 27-foot-long great room with an 18-foot-long gallery and a 27-foot-long eat-in kitchen and a 16-foot-long court.  The basement has a 22-foot-long media room.

The “flats” are two-bedroom units with 3,028 square feet with 13-foot-long entry foyer, 33-foot-long gallery, a 20-foot-long living room with an 8-foot-long bar, a 12-foot-long dining room and a 18-foot-long kitchen with very handsome multipane glass folding doors.