623 Broadway
also 190 Mercer Street | NoHo | built 1882
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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.
- 1882
John B. Snook designs a cast-iron warehouse at 623 Broadway for Thomas Lewis
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John B. Snook designed this warehouse, built in 1881-82 for Thomas Lewis as Broadway turned increasingly commercial; the building application listed it as a warehouse. Five stories tall, it has a cast-iron Broadway front with rusticated piers, Doric columns on the upper floors and curved window lintels, and a brick side on Mercer Street, where it is numbered 190. Small manufacturing firms occupied it later.
- 1912
Fire breaks out at 623 Broadway and spreads to the taller lofts beside it
On March 26, 1912, fire broke out in this five-story building at 623 Broadway, and the blaze quickly spread to No. 625 next door. Insurance Engineering magazine reported that flames then climbed into the taller neighbors, and it blamed flimsy window protection in the light shaft at 627-629 for the heavy damage to the Richter building, whose tenth story was gutted.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1958
A fire at the Monarch Underwear Company's loft kills 24 workers at 623 Broadway
On March 19, 1958, a fire that began around 4:30 p.m. in a processing oven at the S.T.S. Textile Company's third-floor printing plant killed 24 people at 623 Broadway and injured 15. Ten of the dead were found beneath work benches in the fourth-floor workroom of the Monarch Underwear Company, and six of the injured were hurt jumping after missing the fire nets. The next day Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. called for new laws, including sprinklers, fireproof partitions and fire drills.
“Twenty-four people were killed in a loft fire, between Houston Street and Bleecker Street and fifteen more were injured.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 1998
623 Broadway becomes a health club in 1998, years after its upper floors turned into offices
By the late twentieth century the old loft building had been converted: its upper floors became office space around 1990, and in 1998 the building was turned into a health club. A non-historic storefront and entrance now sit beneath the 1881-82 cast-iron front.
“It was converted to office space on the upper floors c.1990 and to a health club in 1998.”
Nearby
- 625 Broadway2 entries
- Cable Building18 West Houston Street | 11 entries
- H. Richter's Sons Building627 Broadway | 4 entries
- 200 Mercer Street2 entries
- 631 Broadway2 entries
- 88 Bleecker Street2 entries