The building went up as apartments for people who wanted a lift, a fireplace and a door onto a hallway rather than onto a street. Almost nothing about that plan survived contact with the city.
What follows is the short version, assembled from ledgers, floor plans and the marks left on the stair.
1909
Twelve storeys of red brick over a cast-iron frame, with balconies deep enough to sit on and a stair that coils the full height of the building under a skylight. The upper floors were let unfurnished and the top floor, then as now, was studios.
The dining hall on the ground floor was written into the lease. Residents were expected to eat downstairs, and for thirty years most of them did.
1930s
The apartments were divided, then divided again. A composer on the seventh floor kept a piano that could not be moved down the stair and so stayed through four tenancies, and the parlor floor filled every evening with people who had nowhere warmer to be.
The house began taking guests for the night to cover the months when it could not fill the rooms.
1960s
Rent under the roof was cheap because the ceilings sloped and the heat never reached. Painters took the north light, and for two decades the garret ran as a working floor with beds in it.
A resident of the seventh floor left a note in the ledger about the radiators. The management left the note in the ledger.
1990s
The lift failed twice, the roof once. Half the rooms were closed rather than repaired badly, and the dining hall served breakfast only. The building was for sale for most of the decade and did not sell.
The long-stay residents stayed. That is the whole reason there was anything left to restore.
TODAY
The stair, the transoms and the shutters were repaired rather than replaced. The plumbing, the wiring and the lift were replaced rather than repaired. Rooms were put back to the sizes the floor plan wanted instead of the sizes the market did, which is why there are forty-six of them and not seventy.
The dining room opens at seven. The top floor is still let to people who work at night.
The radiators knocked all winter and we called it company.
A RESIDENT OF THE SEVENTH FLOOR, 1968