Down a narrow Financial District street one block north of the Federal Reserve — past a cobbler and a secondhand gem seller — an era has quietly come to an end in one of Manhattan’s earliest skyscrapers.
“Everyone in my building had lived there for over a decade,” artist Molly Crabapple told The Post of 14 Maiden Lane, the 128-year-old former Diamond Exchange she’d called home for 12 years before being evicted along with all other building residents last month.
Built for jewelers in 1894, the 10-story, nine-unit loft building discreetly served as a private arts mecca over the past decade — a residential hub of creativity for inhabitants and their huge network of friends and collaborators.
Blessed with enormous lofts, the occupants built a community for themselves and the countless like-minded spirits they invited into their sprawling, light-filled apartments. The tenants lacked the star power or notoriety to earn the building anything close to a Chelsea Hotel or Factory-level reputation, but for those in the know, the address was a diamond in the rough of Manhattan’s tourist and financier-filled southern tip.
“It was a really uniquely magical building. You wouldn’t think that there would be so many artists in the Financial District, but I guess that’s the benefit of being in such a profoundly uncool neighborhood,” said Crabapple, who’d lived in her approximately 1,000-square-foot unit with her partner, the illustrator Fred Harper, since 2010. “We were really tight as a building. I feel really lucky to have had that experience. It was beautiful.”
