Built in 1881 for Leopold Schepp's coconut processing empire, the Schepp Building was engineered to move millions of coconuts a year through heavy machinery, dense storage, and a workforce that made it a fixture of the city's import trade, with timber columns, tall ceilings, arched brick windows, and deep loading bays scaled for industry rather than domestic life. When developer Jeffrey Lamb converted the building into a residential cooperative in 1980 and 1981, he broke from the era's standard practice of gutting old structures and sheathing them in drywall, instead keeping the wide factory floors, exposed brick, and structural timber intact as the foundation for the new residences. That decision now defines the duplex penthouse inside it: a 30-foot run of original 1881 brick anchors the main living floor, skylights and floor openings send daylight down through a curved staircase and open kitchen, and a roof garden extends the home onto the building's original roofline. The result is a residence built directly around the frame of a nineteenth century factory, rather than around an idea of what a factory conversion was supposed to look like.

There is a kind of Soho loft that can’t really be designed. It comes from years of industrial use, followed by artists who moved in and learned to live with what was already there.
Thirteen-foot pressed-tin ceilings, cast-iron radiators, exposed brick and tall arched windows remain less as period details than as ordinary facts of the building. Alex Katz once worked here, long before the loft became a real-estate archetype. What survives is not nostalgia, and not quite preservation either. It is simply the accumulated character of a space that, for more than a century, has been allowed to remain itself.

For more than a century, this remarkable Greek Revival townhouse remained almost entirely out of public view, quietly preserved by a single family while the city around it was continually rebuilt. This articles explore its story from every angle, from its origins in 1841 and likely connection to the Underground Railroad, to its remarkably intact architecture, thoughtfully preserved interiors, and the extraordinary original details that have survived nearly two centuries of everyday life.

Behind its dignified marble facade, this Tribeca loft has lived more lives than most buildings twice its age, a national textbook empire, a customs-fraud bust, a fire that nearly ended it, and a shirtwaist factory shadowed by the era's worst labor abuses. Today, that same industrial shell houses a blue-chip art gallery downstairs and one of Tribeca's most inventive penthouse renovations upstairs, where the building's raw bones have been reimagined into a home built almost entirely around light. It's less a single story than a stack of them, each one still visible if you know where to look.

Every great loft carries traces of the people who lived there. From its origins as a nineteenth-century manufacturing warehouse to nearly fifty years as the private studio of an artist, this Soho loft tells a story not only of architecture, but of the lives that slowly reshape it over time.

For decades, this Noho loft quietly shaped American culture without ever changing itself. Charles Mingus composed here. Kermit Love engineered Mr. Snuffleupagus, and other iconic puppets here. Today, its extraordinary volume, preserved architecture, and uncompromising live-work layout remain one of the clearest surviving expressions of the artist’s loft that defined downtown New York.

A century of manufacturing, art, and architecture lives inside of this Soho loft, revealing why these spaces continue to feel unlike any other homes in New York.

A shell of an apartment in a 1910 warehouse-and-stable building at the edge of the West Village, stripped back to what its industrial past left behind: a central room that drops nearly twenty-seven feet from an entry landing to a sunken living space, windows climbing almost the same height, and timber framing once built to carry horses and freight now standing exposed. The apartment's oversized proportions weren't designed for residential living — they're leftovers from a conversion in the 1980s that gave up trying to force the building into a conventional plan.

What's left isn't a blank slate so much as a set of decisions already made a century ago — height, light, structure — waiting for whoever comes next to build around them rather than over them.