101 Spring Street

This five-story cast-iron building was the home and studio of the sculptor Donald Judd. In 1968 he paid just $68,000 to buy it.

The price was low because the city planned to build a ten-lane highway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, through the neighborhood. The threat scared off developers and kept rents down. With construction pending, artists lived in the lofts illegally, bribing city inspectors to look the other way.

Judd's wife, the dancer Julie Finch, chaired Artists Against the Expressway. "The expressway would kill the last suitable place in the city for lofts," she said. The group filled the Whitney Museum with supporters in 1969, and weeks later Mayor John Lindsay dropped the plan "for all time."

With the building safe, Judd spent years placing art on its floors. He believed where a work sits matters as much as the work itself. "Everything from the first was intended to be thoroughly considered and to be permanent," he wrote.

When Judd died, his will asked that the pieces stay where they were. The Judd Foundation restored the building to match how it looked when he died. The art, including a light sculpture in his bedroom, still sits where he put it.