Gone Baby Gone – 211 Pearl Street to be appended to new construction
From the NYT Cityroom Blog
November 29, 2007, 1:43 pm
A Brick Facade Remains as a Signal for Change
By David W. Dunlap
And then there was one. Or rather, the brick facade of one.
Looking like “Ye Old New-York” set on a Hollywood back lot, 211 Pearl Street is now all that survives of a triptych of 19th-century mercantile buildings that stood until recent years between Maiden Lane and Platt Street.
This month, 213 Pearl Street was reduced to rubble to make way for a hotel being planned by John Lam, a New York developer. The building at No. 215 was torn down last year.
But the facade of No. 211 — a five-story counting house completed in 1832 for William Colgate, the founder of what is now Colgate-Palmolive — was preserved in 2004 as part of the construction of a residential tower at 2 Gold Street by the Rockrose Development Corporation. There are three mysterious shapes in the brickwork.
The counting house will not remain an orphan long in Lower Manhattan. Rockrose is planning a 28-story apartment building at Maiden Lane and Pearl Street that will abut the facade of No. 211. Part of the new building will be constructed directly behind the surviving facade. There will be apartments behind the old fourth- and fifth-floor windows and a double-height space behind the second- and third-floor windows that could be used for offices, a school or a store. (Maybe a Colgate boutique?) The base of the building will continue to serve as an entrance to an underground garage.