Baker Tribeca Building (New York City, New York)

 warehouse  Add category

6-story warehouse building completed in 1910. Designed by Charles C. Haight for the Protestant Episcopal Society, It is one of four buildings on this block that Haight designed for the Society. The warehouse was designed as two separate buildings facing Hudson Street, fifty feet and twenty feet wide, separated by an interior wall; only the two entrances in the Hudson Street base reveal this dual plan. Both facades are clad in off-white brick and stone.

Massive piers and rounded arches at the base frame the entrances and windows. The pilasters spanning the middle portion of the facade and the spandrels -- strong horizontal elements -- create a grid-like composition. The heightened rhythm of the attic story, carried into the crenelated parapet as well, recalls the traditional termination of a warehouse building. Two elevator bulkheads with gabled roofs are visible, one at the western end of the North Moore Street facade, and one centered above the Hudson Street facade. The loading platform is located at the west end of the Beach Street facade where a sheet-metal canopy supported by cast-iron brackets shelters one wide and two narrow loading bays.

Upon completion, it was leased by the Lamont, Corliss & Company grocery business that still occupied the building in 1934 when the interconnecting doors of the two units were sealed and the buildings began to be used separately. The building was later used as manufacturing lofts for plastic products, fine steel wire, and abrasive paper and cloth, and occupied by Pastene & Company, importers.