Waste Not, Something Something

I was passing through Tribeca last week and came across this little building. Very, very little.

Three stories tall, maybe 40 feet wide, and about four feet deep on the left and maybe a luxurious ten or fifteen feet deep on the right. You know you’re in a city where real estate is expensive when such a building exists and is in use. My first thought was that the surveyor who laid out the block at the corner of Reade and Greenwich Streets somehow didn’t think of combining this triangular sliver of land with the lot behind it, facing Greenwich, but then I spent about three minutes in research and I mentally apologized to him. Reade Street was widened – in 1860 – and this lot was truncated, and the sliver building built almost immediately afterwards. Here’s the sliver looking much the same in 1894:

Notice how much deeper the lots are on the north (top) side of the block, facing Duane Street. Here it is in 1853, with the much bigger lot:

The second amusing bit of frugality in this story, after the use of the tiny sliver lot, is in the 1857 map. Here’s the close-up:

Note that the map shows the sliver after the street widening, even though it is dated three years earlier. These map books were expensive to make and expensive to buy, and show real estate conditions, which change all the time. The solution was that the map-making companies would mail updates to their customers, which could be glued into the book. Here’s a larger view of that block:

I’ve played with the contrast a bit. You can see a piece of paper glued over the original map and covering the south half of the Greenwich Street front on the left and the Reade Street front from Greenwich as far east as number 148. There’s another piece of paper glued over the east half of the Reade Street front, with some inexpert trimming at the corner of Reade and Hudson Streets at the lower right. So this map was printed in 1857 and updated in 1860 or so, showing the new sliver building.