The Times has an excellent feature on Joseph Pell Lombardi, the Fidi resident and architect whose conversions sparked the loft movement Downtown. It’s worth reading from top to bottom, but to understand the importance and the forward-thinking here: his conversion of Liberty Tower on Liberty and Nassau was the first major residential conversion of an office building in Financial District. And that was nearly five decades ago. I think we can say that his work and his thinking have shaped our lives here.

“Joe’s work has been groundbreaking,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, told The Times. “He changed the way we see cities, the way we see the utility of old buildings. He’s been widely imitated.”

I first learned about him just a couple years ago, when I made a field trip to the Armour-Stiner Octagon House, a historic home in Irvington, NY, that he restored. You know Lombardi’s work here in the neighborhood: he is responsible for preserving (and this is not the full list by any means) 161 Duane (Mohawk), 27 N. Moore (Ice House), 25 N. Moore (Atalanta), 14 Leonard (Juilliard), 79 Laight (Sugar Warehouse), 145 Hudson (Skylofts), 7 Hubert, the National City Bank Building on Canal and Broadway, and the Haughwout Building in Soho on Broadway and Broome, among hundreds of others. His offices are on Broadway and Canal; he still keeps an apartment in Liberty Tower.

His interest in preservation made him a pariah at first among his architecture classmates — this being six decades ago; he is 84 — but he is now the head of the pack. From The Times: “He and other architects have shown that even modern office buildings with wide floor plans can be converted — though at considerable expense — by dropping shafts through them to create courtyards and provide windows and light for interior apartments. Today, he noted with pride, his ideas are widely accepted; virtually every architectural firm has a preservation department and does commercial-to-residential conversions.

He purchased Liberty Tower, the former headquarters of Sinclair oil, in 1978, when he was 38 years old. From The Times: “He was entranced by the neo-Gothic elegance of its terra-cotta exterior, adorned with gargoyles, alligators and birds; its huge windows had an unobstructed view of New York Harbor. With just $25,000 down, he bought the 1909 building at a bargain-basement price of $922,000, and then — to the bafflement of the real estate industry — he converted it into 89 co-op apartments.”

Bafflement no more. Here are just a few:

Gryffindor, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission