Glass Lofts to Transform Tribeca Gateway
By Barry Owens

The view from the upper floors of a residential tower planned for 1 York Street will no doubt be astonishing. When the final panes of glass are in place next year, new residents of the loft building will have a clear, 360-degree view of the surrounding Manhattan skyline.

Rendering of a proposed residential loft building at 1 York Street. Architect Enrique Norten said it was time to embrace a “new moment” in Tribeca architecture. Rendering: Ten Architechtos

Perhaps as striking as the vista from within the building will be the neighbors’ views of the loft dwellers themselves as they go about their lives in glass houses high above Canal Street.

The existing seven-story, Civil War-era industrial building on Sixth Avenue between Canal and York Streets is to be converted into a 13-story loft building. The top six floors will be glass penthouses, and a portion of the building’s midsection will be carved out and replaced with glass as well.

The idea, said architect Enrique Norten, is to use contemporary materials to rehabilitate a building that stands today as little more than an architectural afterthought. A portion of the eastern side of the building was lopped off when Sixth Avenue was carved through in 1927 for the creation of the Independent subway line (today’s A train), leaving a windowless facade that is now plastered with a billboard.

“It is not a great building,” said Norten, an architect who sits on the World Trade Center Memorial Committee.

Norten said he wanted to completely transform the building by incorporating glass throughout. Further, the surrounding sidewalk will be landscaped, a parking lot currently on the site will be eliminated, and retail space planned for the ground level may become a restaurant.

“We want to bring life to what is today a dead corner,” Norten said.

Bruce Hanks, general manager of the Tribeca Grand and Soho Grand hotels, called the corner “the gateway to Tribeca, but the ugliest corner in the neighborhood.”

Hanks was one of several people who spoke in favor of the project at last month’s meeting of Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee, which recommended approving developer Stan Perelman’s plan to convert the building to residential units. There are to be 41 units, 27 of them in the glass structure. Construction is scheduled to begin in July and is expected to take 14 months.

But not everyone at the meeting was taken with Norten’s design.

“It looks like it belongs in midtown,” said Scott Whalen, a resident of 260 West Broadway, just south of the project site, who was joined at the meeting by about a dozen of his neighbors.

“It looks like something alien landed in the neighborhood,” said Paul Yeager, another 260 West Broadway resident, who also voiced his opposition to the full community board later in the month.

The full board approved the permits, though four members voted in opposition.

“The alternative to this is that someone else will come along, tear it down and build a glass building with blue tinted windows,” said board member George Olsen.

Blue-tinted windows would at least afford some privacy to future residents. 

“Not all of the glass is completely transparent; some of it is opaque,” Norten told the Trib.

And for added privacy, Norten is designing interior blinds. “They won’t be able to come in and just put up their red curtains,” he said. “That would not be allowed.”