About the Building

155-foot, 12-story residential/office building completed in 1908. Designed by William J. Dilthey and constructed for Charles Broadway Rouse, a prominent nineteenth century merchant as an annex to his main store on Broadway. The 8-bay Mercer Street facade goes through the block with a wider frontage on Greene Street. On Greene, it is clad in red brick, rusticated at the 2-story base, with rough stone pier footings and a limestone cornice across the top of the 2nd floor bearing Rouse’s name. The two main entrances, at either side, are set under segmental-arches with splayed brick headers, and have grey columns framing the doorways. The upper floors have stone sills and brick lintels, with single-window outer bays, and three middle bays of paired windows. Above a corbelled brick cornice, the top floor has a peaked parapet above both of the end bays.

On Mercer Street, the ground floor is dark-grey cast-iron, with semi-circular fanlights over the outer two bays on each side. The ground floor is capped by a broad entablature with carved garlands flanking Rouse’s name. The 2nd floor is clad in rusticated limestone, with cartouches on the outer piers, above a wreath and hanging garlands. The 3rd floor is transitional, with red brick, but also a limestone cap, extruded at the piers. From the 4th floor up, the brick of the 2nd-to-outer pier is rusticated. The 11th floor has round-arched windows in the two outer bays on each side, and a stone cornice. The top floor is crowned by a projecting black metal roof cornice, and an elaborate white iron fire escape runs down the center two bays.

The building was renovated into a multi-use residential/office/store building by Joseph Pell Lombardi. The ground floor is occupied by Mackage outerwear, and Journelle lingerie on Mercer Street, and Goldman Properties, Design Within Reach, and the Soho Building Cafe. On the Greene Street side there is an artwork embedded in the sidewalk, Subway Map Floating on a New York Sidewalk, a 1986 work by Francoise Schein. It’s a more or less accurate schematic of the subway c. 1986, but the Uptown end is pointing Downtown and vice versa.