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Owner Asks $17.5M For Bogardus Beauty
That ticket goes by the name of 75 Murray Street, the gleaming five-story, 1858 cast iron townhouse that he and his wife, Christianne, bought as a wreck in 1993 for $650,000, the $135,000 down payment being their life savings. Now, with their two sons grown and years of meticulous renovations complete, Aprile is ready to cash in. The asking price for the 14,400-square-foot building (and he calls it “cheap” for the Tribeca market): $17.5 million. “I’m a little guy. I worked for a living,” said Aprile, 60. “It’s bizarre.” A former messenger service owner from Bensonhurst, Aprile speaks in the gravelly, expletive-peppered Brooklynese of a movie tough. (Not wanting to be recognized on the street—“There’s that schmuck, they’ll say”—Aprile declined to be photographed for this article.) Aprile said he has already turned down $16 million and he is in no hurry to sell. For one thing, he sees the building’s market value continue to soar, a million dollars a year by his reckoning. For another, he loves the place. He had never heard of James Bogardus, the inventor of cast iron architecture, when he and Christianne bought the run-down building as a fixer-upper so that they could live near Stuyvesant High School, their son’s school. What Aprile was to learn was that 75 Murray Street, already declared a landmark, was one of only two buildings in the city known to be designed by the “father of cast iron architecture.” Bogardus’ mid-19th-century invention of prefabricated cast iron facades allowed building owners to attach a classy Venetian or Roman front to their otherwise pedestrian properties. “Buying a Bogardus building unbeknownst is comparable, in today’s terms, to purchasing a modest house somewhere and later finding out that it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright,” Tribeca historian Oliver Allen wrote of the discovery in a 1995 article in the Trib. The building had no electricity or water, the stairs were ruined, and the roof was shot. “We were running around with buckets,” Aprile recalled. But first things first: Aprile revealed the building’s outer beauty. He removed the fire escapes, stripped the facade down to the metal, painted it a creamy white and flooded it with light, giving the front a glowing nighttime presence on an otherwise dark and undistinguished block. Seated at a table in his apartment, the owner thumbed through the reproduction of a catalogue of prefabricated cast iron columns, arches, cornices and other features that 19th-century building owners could choose from. It was as if he was admiring it all for the first time. “Look at that, hand drawn,” he said of the painstakingly rendered details of ready-to-order facades. The pieces for his building, Aprile believes, came from Daniel Badger’s Architectural Iron Works on nearby Duane Street. Any tour of the building includes a kind of salute to Bogardus’ brilliance: the front section of one floor where Aprile has exposed the nuts, bolts and straps that secure the columns and ornamentation of the facade to the rest of the building. On the ground floor is a grand hall and below it a bar/lounge where Aprile, a jazz aficionado, had dreamed of opening a restaurant and jazz club. “The person who buys this is going to be one happy millionaire,” said Aprile, who thinks it will be too costly for a developer to turn the building into condos. For all the windfall that this seller stands to gain, he asserts that his love affair with 75 Murray Street has never been about money. And it probably won’t end when he is gone. “I don’t have to live here. I can look at it, say I did it,” Aprile said. “It’s been a nice experience. It’s been a hell of an experience.”
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