(Photo: Bob Berg/Getty Images (Mekas); Courtesy of the broker (interior))

16 Greene Street, Apartment 1N
The Facts: A 2,923-square-foot loft with two bathrooms.
Asking price: $2.5 million.
Maintenance: $2,020 per month.
Agent: Julia Hoagland, Brown Harris Stevens.

Where was gentrified Soho born? There’s a good case to be made that it arrived at 16 Greene Street, one of the first loft buildings transformed by artist George Maciunas into live-work cooperatives in the late sixties. (Another was at 80 Wooster Street.) The pioneer residents included the artists Martha Moses and Bob Wiegand, and the buildings came to be known as Fluxhouses, after the Fluxus art collective. Maciunas apparently reserved part of the top floor of 16 Greene for himself. The bottom two floors that are now for sale were supposed to house a cinemathèque run by Jonas Mekas, the avant-garde filmmaker and Warhol collaborator who founded Anthology Film Archives. (According to Illegal Living, a new history of 80 Wooster by Roslyn Bernstein and Shael Shapiro, Mekas never actually got the theater open.) Records peg Mekas’s monthly rent back then at $500—or one five-thousandth of today’s selling price.

Related:

• Archive: “Real Estate”
• Articles by S.Jhoanna Robledo
• Table of Contents: Oct 31, 2011 issue of New York | Subscribe!