Fleming Smith Warehouse | apartment building

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6-story cooperative-apartment building completed in 1891. Designed by Stephen Decatur Hatch as a warehouse for Fleming Smith, the building is faced with granite, sandstone and brick with copper ornamentation in a neo-Flemish design. The ground floor is clad in heavily rusticated sandstone above a rough granite watertable. Above a stone cornice, the upper floors are clad in yellow brick. The north facade is divided into a central bay and two outer bays on each side, each with three windows. The outer bays are unified at the 2nd-3rd floors with sandstone quoins, ending in segmental-arches. Corbelled cornices run across the bases of the 5th floor, which has paired round-arched windows. Three smaller round-arched windows make up the outer bay of the top floor, topped by a high, steep gable with copper coping. The more central outer bays have a single window at the top floor, topped by a projecting copper dormer and conical hood with weather vanes. The center bay is wider, framed by projecting brick piers with sandstone banding up to the 4th floor. Here, there is a single large round-arch, with an arched sandstone header, and a massive sandstone-quoined gable rising up and encompassing the top two floors - the 5th floor having four square-headed windows, and the 6th having three round-arched windows, with the central window being larger. A single small oriel window is located below the peak of the gable, which is crowned by a finial. Ornate wrought-iron balconies span each floor of the center bay, and iron ornaments on located on the piers framing the center bay, as well as on the piers between the two outer bays.

On the narrower west elevation, three bays wide, the materials and general design are the same. The two outer bays have the same copper dormers, and there is a central gable with a round-arched window. Copper numerals on this gable write out the date of the building (1891), while Fleming Smith's monogram entwines above them. This gable is also crowned by a copper finial. A suspended metal awning covers the ground floor on this side.

At the turn of the century Smith's building housed a shoe manufacturer and a wine storehouse. It continued to serve as a warehouse through most of the 1900s. In the late 1970s a complete facade restoration was performed by Scott Henson Architects, LLC, and subsequently 135 Watt Street became the first commercial Tribeca building to be converted to residential use. Today a restaurant is housed in the space where horse-drawn drays once backed in to receive crates of wine.