Wood's Mercantile Buildings

50 White Street | Tribeca | built 1867

Open on the map4 entries

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

1. 1865

   Brooklyn merchants Samuel and Abraham Wood build three five-story stores and unite them as one

   Dry-goods merchants Samuel and Abraham Wood, who lived in Brooklyn, put up three five-story buildings at 46 and 48-50 White Street in 1865-67 and joined them into one seventy-five-foot-wide structure. The base is a cast-iron storefront made by the J.B. and W.W. Cornell foundry, topped by marble-faced upper floors in the Second Empire style. The brothers also commissioned the neighboring No. 58 around the same time.

   Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

2. 1865

   The Woods' warehouse is a simple marble palazzo with a cast-iron base that later builders copied

   The Landmarks Commission describes the Woods Mercantile Buildings as marble, five stories high and ten windows wide, with a cast-iron ground floor of Tuscan columns and a pediment bearing the name and the date 1865. Its plain, repeated window bays became a model: the commission points to No. 60 White Street (1869) and 385 Broadway (1875) as later buildings that imitated it. The aim of such facades was to look like stone while going up quickly and cheaply.

   Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

3. 1900

   The Wood family keeps the White Street building for nearly a century

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   The Woods' importing business became Wood's Dry Goods Commission Agency, headquartered on Broadway by the early twentieth century. The White Street property stayed in the family for almost a hundred years, housing importers and jobbers of dry goods and clothing, among them J.R. Leeson and Company, billed as the country's largest linen-thread importing house. A firm that stored, mixed and sold dry dyes came later.

   Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

4. 1978

   The upper floors of the Wood's Mercantile Buildings are converted to apartments

   Between 1978 and 1984 the upper stories of 46 and 48-50 White Street, long used by dry-goods and dye firms, were converted to residential use under an alteration filed in 1978 by architect Vincent Trocchia. The ground floor stayed commercial, with a textile firm as the occupant when the Landmarks Commission surveyed the district.

   Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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All 564 buildings with stories in Tribeca