Then, now in SoHo.

1870 was a busy year for Henry Ferbach. He had four cast iron spectacles of his design simultaneously rising from the streets of what was then called southern Greenwich Village in the years before the acronym SoHo carved out the neighborhood’s new identity.

Its enormous window sashes, gradually decreasing in height in each story to give the building the illusion it is taller, were topped with graceful arches and iron keystones, each separated by simple stately Doric columns and each row articulated by rich overhanging cornices, the roofline crowned with dental molding. It is the sheer repetition of elements that makes the building so satisfying, and the high relief of those elements that make it so engaging.

Its stated function on opening was factory. Its role in the fur trade, the trade that put this island on the map, is both a testament to the industry’s historical breadth as it is a final punctuation mark to a dark chapter in America’s gluttony for the product.

In 1871, buffalo pelts were in high demand. The furriers of 165 Mercer Street were doing the equivalent of three to six million dollars a year in sales. By 1884, the American buffalo population (bison, in actuality) had put the species on the endangered list. Tens of thousands of the majestic animals that once roamed the vast plains of America’s interiors had dwindled to a few hundred.

Thereafter the building was quickly converted into a garage, an incarnation that would span the transition from carriages to automobiles. After a brief stint as the front for a rum-running operation during the years of Prohibition, it returned to its legal pursuits actually fixing cars.

As NYC fell into dysfunction in the 1960s, the neighborhood was largely abandoned. A plan to put a multi-laned multi-level highway through the heart of SoHo would have spelled the demise of 165 Mercer Street and all its brothers and sisters from Ferbach’s drawing board and those of his contemporaries. The loss architecturally would have even incalculable.

Fortunately with the death of Robert Moses, the man who proposed the highway, died the dream of that dumb project and the influx of artists brought wealth back to the once wealthy streets of now, SoHo.

165 Mercer has been lovingly restored to better condition than frankly it ever was. Research matches the original cream color, high tech offices replaced the fumes of broken automobiles, and, set back so as not to ruin the original lines

of the perfectly proportioned facade, now sits a tony glassy penthouse for some guzzillionaire to enjoy the air on top of his kingdom on one of the most sought after street addresses in the world.