Jennifer Gould

Jennifer Gould

Music

Bob Dylan’s Village recording studio now a luxury rental building

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124 W. Houston St.Richard Caplan
Richard Caplan
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Richard Caplan
Richard Caplan
Richard Caplan
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Richard Caplan
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In 1973, Bob Dylan went back to the piano and created some of his most famous songs from a ground-floor recording studio and rehearsal space at 124 W. Houston St.

The landmarked cast-iron building, between Sullivan and Thompson streets, is now launching as a luxury rental building, with rents running from $12,500 per month to $18,000 for the penthouse, which includes a rooftop garden, developer Roland Dib, of Dib Management, tells Gimme Shelter. The building’s three renovated units are all market-rate, but Dib adds there’s an octogenarian rent-stabilized tenant on the fifth floor, who pays just under $1,000 a month.

Dylan’s former recording studio is now available as two commercial space, which are now up for rent together or separately. (The street level unit for $19,000/month, the lower level for $9,000.) Both levels served as the Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s studio, where he created songs for the album “Blood on the Tracks,” including the songs “Tangled Up In Blue,” “You’re Going To Make Me Lonesome When You Go” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.”

Bob DylanGetty Images

Another former resident of 124 W. Houston is Village Voice columnist Lucian Truscott IV, who wrote about how he kept a chair under the stairs, where he’d sit to hear Dylan playing and singing — and struggling, like all artists do — on the other side. “Dylan was trying to put his life back together at the piano. … When you walked in the lobby you could hear him sometimes, composing music and trying out lyrics,” Truscott wrote. “There was only a thin sheetrock wall between Dylan’s studio and the lobby, and Dylan had an upright piano right against that wall.”

The building also housed the late artist team Madeline Arakawa Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, who launched their artistic nonprofit, the Reversible Destiny Foundation, there. The couple believed that art and architecture could extend human life. (One of their creations is the “Bioscleave House” in East Hampton, build on different levels with no internal doors for privacy, to keep people guessing and, therefore, young, they claimed.)

Dib tells Gimme Shelter that he has preserved as much as he can during renovations. He bought the building for $15.4 million in 2013. “This is a rare piece of New York culture with a great past,” he says.

The units will have electronic key-locked elevators that open to individual apartments with 24-hour security/surveillance.

Rebecca Bruce, of Daizy Realty, has the listings.