73. American Thread Building

A.K.A.: Wool Exchange Building
Location: 260 West Broadway
Built: 1894-96
Architect: William B. Tubby
National Register Number: 04001532
Listed: January 20, 2005
Visited: May 21 and 24, 2008



This building's NRHP registration form details the neat irony of how it's housed, in successive order, a commodities exchange for wool, a thread company, and in its current incarnation as a residential conversion, fashion models. That's three steps in the production chain of apparel: materials to manufacture to promotion. (Or, more pretentiously, three steps in the economic organization of the United States: pre-industrial to industrial to post-industrial.)

The building's history actually wasn't quite as tidy as my glib description makes it sound. The wool exchange lasted only two years while The American Thread Company stayed here from 1901 to 1964. What happened after the move but before the conversion is a little murky to me, but in 1979, it served as an exhibition space where a 20-year-old Keith Haring painted one of the ephemeral--and unremovable--works he first made his name with. Astonishingly, the mural was rediscovered last December by contractors developing the space into a triplex.

Now I like Haring just fine--even though his work's become as dully commonplace in gay homes as a rainbow flag, the stuff that's almost purely non-representational cartoon form is still eye-bustingly beautiful. But what's left of the mural seems so very shabby compared to the triplex itself (at least in its life as a 3D rendering), obscenely spacious and light-filled in a way few New York City residences ever are.