Spotlight 5th Ave: Beautiful Former Furniture Store

I lived in that building for 4 years (moved out in late 2000). At that time the neighborhood was pretty deserted. Not a hipster in sight. (and rent was about $2000).

It has only 2 living spaces. Each occupying an entire floor, so they were huge, but the top floor cielings were only about 10 or 12 feet.

I lived in the other space. It was an astounding space. Our loft was about 3000 – 3500 sq. ft. (I forget exactly, but once I did measure it) with a mezzanine that ran 40 feet and housed our kitchen. And a staircase that went to a “backyard” of cement and overgrown ivy. The cielings are 18 feet high. I am not kidding. I measured them. One year we had a 15′ xmas tree and it didn’t even look oversized.

The place was divided up into 4 bedrooms, an art studio, a darkroom, and a giant giant living room. NOrmal sofas looked like doll house furntiure in the space. our rooommate got a vintage S shaped couch from a hotel lobby and recovered it in red velvet. It could seat about 8 people.

The landlords never fixed anything. We had to buy the kitchen cabinets ourselves and put them up. We had squirrels living in the cielings. They came in through a number of missing bricks near the roofline in the backyard. You could hear them scurrying around in the cieling, hissing and fighting. Very creepy at 3am.

There was the time the furnace was emitting deadly fumes. Lucikly we could smell them and called the landlord. They advised that we open the windows, go to sleep and the “super” would come out the next day. Ah, no thanks. We called the FDNY. When the FDNY came, they also noticed the sprinkler system was completely empty. Nice touch, landlords. That wasn’t the only time the furnance nearly killed the occupants.

Not to mention the furnace would heat the place to about 80 degrees, then it would crap out and go off entirely. One time we came home on xmas night after being away for 3 days and the furnance had been out. It was about 20 degrees in the loft. We slept fully dressed, under a mound of blankets.

At some point in the building’s recent history it must have been a sweatshop. In the cracks between the floorboards you could still find sewing needles with frequency.

But mostly, it was huge, huge, huge. You could run laps in that place.

I just bought on 6th avenue at 19th (1 block from pic) 16 mos. ago. There’s been a lot of change around there in that short time. A lot of abandoned commercial spaces have been revitalized, I couldn’t tell you about evictions…

The space above the dollar store I thought was unused, I could be wrong. The building accross the street on 19th has loft-type spaces like bstr is talking about, as do a couple of other spaces near by.

i looked at an apartment there a few years back…it was nice and big (the ceiling heights weren’t that tall), but the rents were exorbitant.