Sales have started at the 8-story new building at 159 Bleecker Street in the heart of the South Village on the former site of the Circle-in-the-Square Theater.

The building has 16 residential condominiums and has been been developed by John Young of Emmut Properties, who also was the architect for the project.

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 and prices start of about $795,000 and range up to about $1,800,000.

Each unit has a large balcony or terrace and the building also has a roof deck with views in all directions.

The mid-block building, which 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 has a light-yellow brick facade above it two-story red-brick retail facade that features a large marquee just to the east of the building's very attractive black multipaned windowed entrance.

The retail spaces, that formerly accommodated the Circle-in-the-Square Theater, which was one of the city's most prominent and important Off-Broadway venues, 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.

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 is the Figaro coffee house on Macdougal Street and Washington Square Park is one block to the north.