I love a hardhat tour, and this one did not disappoint, especially since I got to climb up the scaffold on the outside of the building and see some Tribeca cast iron features up close in a way usually reserved for pigeons.

What was the Belle Reve taxpayer and the L-shaped Paramount/Boltex Textile Company building on the northeast corner of Walker and Church is now 32 Walker, four full-floor apartments plus a penthouse duplex plus retail on the ground floor. The developers are aiming to be done in summer 2026.

This is the final coda for old Tribeca — when family businesses were housed in the warehouses that made up the neighborhood. Other than the Telephone Sales & Service Company at 132 West Broadway, I can’t think of another. The Sofia Brothers warehouse on Franklin and Varick was sold and emptied in July.

Jonathan Braun and Eddie Bender from Prosper Property Group, one of the developers, showed me around both the new infill building on the corner — we scrambled up the exterior scaffold — and the old buildings, which date back to 1867. They are now connected on the interior to create four full-floor units plus a duplex penthouse that match the new to the old. There are still the arched window, 10- to 14-foot ceilings and tons of cast iron details that are now being restored.

(The building is in the Tribeca East Historic District. See the excerpt from the designation report below and Tom Miller’s history here.)

The listing will be with Serhant; they sent the renderings below of the facades and the penthouse’s roof deck.

The Belle Reve building (aka 305-309 Church) sold in February 2024 for $5.25 million, and 32-34 Walker as well as 309 Church was sold for $11.6 million in February.

Rendering courtesy Serhant

Rendering courtesy Serhant

Rendering courtesy Serhant

From the landmarks designation report:
This five-story, L-shaped store and loft building extends twenty-five feet on both Church and Walker streets. Erected in 1867-68 to the design of E.J.M. Derrick, it replaced a three-story frame building facing Church Street and a four-story masonry dwelling with a small rear structure, which apparently housed a butcher, on Walker Street.

Commissioned by Heine, Huber & Company, a firm probably associated with local dry goods merchant David R. Heine, the new building stood on a site owned by attorney John F. Delaplaine (d. 1885), whose father, an eminent merchant in drugs and Mediterranean imports, acquired it in 1845. Identical in design, the two cast-iron Italianate facades feature colonnaded storefronts (missing their ornamental details), superimposed tiers of pilaster-framed arcaded openings which display prominent keystones and rest on intermediate cornices, paneled and inscribed end piers, and bracketed metal terminal cornices.

Additional surviving historic elements on the Church Street facade include an iron stepped vault cover, paired wood doors with glass, and a foundry plate from the G.R. Jackson Burnet Company, as well as two-over-two wood sash windows at the upper stories. At the Walker Street facade an iron fire escape and most of the historic windows remain.