Cube Building
16 2nd Avenue | also 18 2nd Avenue | East Village | built 1900
Open on the map2 entries
The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1900
Schneider & Herter design a seven-story tenement for Leopold Kaufmann
Owner Leopold Kaufmann built this seven-story brick tenement at 16-18 Second Avenue in 1900 to designs by Schneider & Herter. The facade has decorative brickwork, with pilasters beside the third-floor windows, triangular pediments over the fifth-floor windows, and round-arched openings on the seventh floor. Stores filled the first floor, and thirty families lived above, five to a floor.
- 1989
The Cooper Square Committee turns the tenement into co-op housing
The building, known as the Cube Building, stood abandoned as city-owned property until the Cooper Square Committee developed it in 1989 into a 22-unit cooperative for formerly homeless families. Village Preservation describes the project as the first cooperative of its kind for homeless families anywhere in the country.
Further reading
- 20-24 Second Avenue; 30-32 East 1st StreetVillage Preservation: East Village Building Blocks
- 16-18 Second AvenueVillage Preservation: East Village Building Blocks
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