Sculptor Richard Serra drops $7M on Tribeca loft, now owns entire building
When this sprawling, full-floor Tribeca loft at 173 Duane Street first hit the market for $7.95 million at the beginning of the year, 6sqft wasn’t the least bit surprised at its strikingly creative interiors, considering it was owned by artist Merrill Steiger. As we noted, it’s the same building where prolific sculptor Richard Serra has lived and worked since the 1990s. At various points, he and his wife Clara have purchased the first, third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors of the early 20th-century cast-iron building, most recently paying just under $4 million for the third floor in 2011. This left only the second floor out of their hands, but LL NYC reports that Serra has just coughed up $7 million for Steiger’s unit, giving him ownership of the entire building.
After his third-floor purchase in 2011, the Observer noted that Serra has been on the fifth floor since 1977. In 1996, he applied for permits to transform the first floor from a residence to an art studio and the remove the interior partitions on the second floor (presumably to better house his large-scale works). The following year, he was granted a permit to add a sixth-floor penthouse the building, tapping architect Richard Gluckman.
His latest acquisition is a 4,223-square-foot home with classic loft details like columns, rounded windows, 11-foot ceilings, and exposed beams. In addition to an open contemporary kitchen and two bedrooms including a master suite, the loft appropriately boasts an enormous 43-by-19-foot artist studio and separate space that can be used as a gym, yoga studio, or office.
[Listing: 173 Duane Street, 2nd Floor by Joshua Gurwitz and Tiffany Sirlin for Good Property]
[Via LL NYC]
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Images courtesy of Good Property
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To correct the errors in your piece on 173-5 Duane here, Richard Serra does not have the entire building. He does, as of this purchase, have all other units except my floor of our building, and there are no plans to change this. He and I have booth lived and worked in this building since 1976, not 1990 for Richard as you wrote. Additionally, the ground floor was never a residence. During the period that both Richard and I have lived and worked here, the ground floor was an elevator repair company, then used for food warehousing then a private art gallery and now studio space.
Back when we each moved here, this block was still very much Washington Market, the street busy with wholesale food shipments, trucks, forklifts and active warehouse workers. We in the arts who rented a few of the empty unused spaces, lofts increasingly left vacant and unrentable by the decline of the produce industry here and the lack of small industrial tenants for “sweatshop-sized spaces”– we artists were also small independent businesses. This was very much a working person’s area back then, both warehouse and arts workers, not at all residential. There were no schools, no grocery stores and no retail was allowed on the cross streets. It was another world.