64. Cary Building

Location: 105-107 Chambers Street
Built: 1856-57
Architect: King & Kellum
National Register Number: 83001719
Listed: September 15, 1983
Visited: April 13, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYC PLC report



The Cary, Howard & Sanger dry goods store offered an overwhelming consumer experience when it first opened. In 1872, some eleven years after Cary died, the store (then known as Howard, Sanger Co.) was so o'erstuffed the New York Times took it upon itself to describe the goods sold at the store in numbing detail, floor by floor: brushes, toiletries, hosiery, fabric, leather goods down to "memorandum books, pass-books, marking chalk for lumbermen, violin strings, toy paint-boxes, and agate buttons in thousands of packages." Today, it's unfathomable that such an little thing, lost in Tribeca, could ever have been a major retail hub. In terms of volume, the building is likely dwarfed by your average suburban supermarket.



If it still transmits an echo of commercial extravangance--of attentions being sought--it's thanks to the façades on its Chambers and Reade Street sides. Like other New York City cast-irons of the 1850s, it takes after the Italian palazzo, even going so far as to include rustication. Traditional, yes, but it's all in cast-iron, not stone or brick, and glowing unearthily clean and white. Sadly, a widening of Church Street in the '20s knocked down the building right next to it, leaving a brick wall barely enlivened by some windows added much later.