8 Thomas Street

 landmark, condominium

5-story Victorian-Gothic residential building completed in 1875. Designed by Jarvis Morgan Slade as a soap store for the David S. Brown Company, it is clad in sandstone, granite, red brick and has a white-painted, cast-iron storefront. The facade features stone arcades with banded voussoirs and polished granite Ionic columns, an iron cornice and a slate-tiled gable roof with an oculus window.

David S. Brown's soap company occupied by the building until 1898, when wholesale woolen merchants W. S. Taylor & Bloodgood moved in. A decade later, in 1908, George R. Gibson Co., manufacturers of “faultless canvas roofing,” moved in, above the Café Renel which was now on the ground floor. On March 17, 1948 former Manhattan Borough President Samuel Levy and real estate mogul Charles F. Noyes purchased nearly three entire downtown blocks from the Society of the New York Hospital, including 8 Thomas Street. The building was designated a landmark by the city in 1978 and on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. In 1984 the building was converted to house two floor-through art studios, each with a separate floor for living space; and a ground floor restaurant. It was converted again in 2007 to four condominium residences.