I’ve always wanted to get inside the Mercantile Exchange Building at 6 Harrison at Hudson and this listing from broker Nicole Gary got my attention quick. At first I thought it was a residential conversion, but it’s a 7000-square-foot commercial condo (duh on my part). But that makes it is just about the coolest office space in the neighborhood.

It’s not for the pampered set. To get to your desk it’s an elevator ride to the fifth floor then a walk up some steep stairs to what is essentially the attic of the 140-year-old building. But then you are living Tribeca history.

There are the most amazing wood beams throughout, reinforced with steel, and you can see out the round window of the tower as well as the dormer windows on the east and south side. A huge skylight stretches along the entire peak. The offices are open to the main room, but are sunken from the entrance level and separated by walls from each other.

Read an excerpt from the history of the Exchange in Tom Miller’s account of the building below; it was also the home of Chanterelle from 1989 to 2009 and the Dia Art Foundation from 1977 to 1985, when its founders renovated the building to house “Dream House,” a sound and light installation created by minimalist composer La Monte Young and multimedia artist Marian Zazeela.

In the middle of the 19th century, buyers and sellers of various commodities recognized the need to organize in order to maintain quality and standards, to eliminate questionable practices and set down rules of doing business. Among the several “exchanges” was the Butter and Cheese Exchange of New York, formed in 1872 when the dairy men broke off from the Produce Exchange.

The new exchange quickly broadened its base, admitting the egg trade soon after (and changing the name to the Butter, Cheese and Egg Exchange), then including dried fruits, poultry and canned goods in 1882 when the name was changed again to the all-inclusive New York Mercantile Exchange.

Three years later, in 1885, grocers were admitted to the exchange. By now there were 801 members and as additional trades were added, the membership was limited to 1000 with an initiation fee of $500. The growth demanded a larger space to conduct business and land was purchased from the Trinity Corporation at the corner of Harrison and Hudson Streets for a new building.

Architect Thomas R. Jackson was commissioned to design the new exchange. Jackson, who had been head draftsman under Richard Upjohn, created a five-story red brick Queen Anne style building with an imposing off-set tower over the Harrison Street entrance. The finished structure cost $400,000. Rusticated granite pillars, terra cotta Corinthian capitols on brick pilasters and carved stone ornamentation combined with gables paired stone columns on the fifth floor and picturesque dormers in the tower’s mansard cap created a visual feast.

By 1939, the Exchange was the trading center for 7,500,000 cases of eggs and 3,500,000 tubs of butter every year. Business was conducted throughout most of the 20th Century here; with a high-speed ticker system being installed in 1972, the year of the Exchange’s centennial. That year The Times remarked on the wide variety of commodities being exchanged. The old building was, it said, “where futures in Maine potatoes, platinum, United States silver coins, imported boneless beef and palladium are traded.”

In 1994, the New York Mercantile Exchange, by now called NYMEX, merged with COMEX and left the venerable old brick building, moving to a new trading facility at 4 World Trade Center (and three years later to the World Financial Center). For a period the building was home to Local 1180 of the Communications Workers of America. Today the structure has been sensitively converted into condominiums with a restaurant on the ground floor.