The building’s owners, Diamond Lane LLC, did not return The Post’s request for comment. An attorney for the owners didn’t immediately provide comment on their behalf.Īt the very least, former residents have their memories.ĭuring the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the building - which is a block away from Zuccotti Park - became something of an “unofficial press room” for protestors who’d “drink my whiskey, use my outlets, take showers after they got out of jail” Crabapple recalled. After the building sold in January, for $9.5 million, the new owners allegedly let everyone’s leases run out and served all remaining tenants eviction papers, giving them only the minimum legal warning. Life at 14 Maiden Lane was always a trade-off, former residents say: Having an entire, ethereal corner of New York City to themselves for below market rent came at the cost of dealing with a landlord they allege was negligent, refused to fix most issues and periodically showed up in disguise to steal from them. It was beautiful.”Ĭrapabble approximates that her loft measured in at something like 1,000 square feet. I feel really lucky to have had that experience. 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. “It was a really uniquely magical building. When 14 Maiden Lane was constructed in 1894 it was one of the city’s tallest - and much later it became home to a number of creatives, who can no longer call this address their own. 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. “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.īuilt 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.īlessed with enormous lofts, the occupants built a community for themselves and the countless like-minded spirits they invited into their sprawling, light-filled apartments. ‘New Yorkers need relief’: Adams’ call to feds as eviction moratorium expiresĬuomo ‘worrying about his freakin’ political future,’ instead of New York: polsĭown 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. ‘Wellness’ experts shirk $349,000 rent in Upper East Side eviction battle: lawsuit Hellbent on rent: NYC landlord posts giant signs calling out non-paying tenants