11 SPRING STREET, SOHO

WHILE journeying over to Elizabeth Street to view the Elizabeth Street Garden, which locals and preservationists want to save, developers are salivating over, and has become something of a political football, I checked on this unusual building at Spring and Elizabeth, where Soho meets Little Italy just west of the Bowery. (I got plenty of photos of the Garden, which will make it to a separate post later on.) Till a few years ago, #11 Spring Street at the NE corner of Spring and Elizabeth was one of the most heavily-graffitied buildings in the city, as hundreds of street artists were allowed to make their various marks here. It was turned into expensive apartment units beginning in 2007. Though it has a Spring Street address, the entrance on that street is long gone and entrances are now on Elizabeth. Unfortunately the shadows weren’t in my favor on a mid-November afternoon.

The building ‘s renaissance comes after years of mystifying passersby. It was known to people in the neighborhood simply as the “candle building,” because of the constant dim light that came from single candles that burned in its windows. An artist who designed theater sets, John Simpson, owned the building between 1974 and 2003. –NY Sun

Mr. Simpson was an eccentric man taken with the idea of mechanization. He outfitted his space with all sorts of primitive but ingenious gadgets, creating quarters that called to mind those of a downtown Da Vinci.

When someone entered the bathroom, for example, and turned on the light switch, a window shade dropped and a transistor radio turned on. A push of a button lowered a soap tray; a push of another button dispensed two sheets of toilet paper. At work stations around the building, Mr. Simpson kept a set of drills, so that no matter what floor he was on, he was never without a tool. —NY Times

Though the building has lost the street art and graffiti it was once famed for, there’s a relatively new addition on the Spring Street side that harks back to its origins. The building went up in 1888 as horse stable and carriage house and once had exterior ramps for the horses to gain entrance to the upper floors. By 1940 it was called the Spring Street Stables.

As this photo on the Guzy Architects site indicates, #11 Spring looks quite a bit different from the way it looked two decades ago.

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11/24/25