The Puck Building is a New York City designated landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The building was the longtime home of Puck magazine, a humor cartoon whose founders Joseph Keppler and Adolph Schwarzmann acquired the site in 1885 with J. Ottmann.

[3][7] In addition, an entrance to the New York City Subway's Broadway–Lafayette Street/Bleecker Street station is directly outside the building to the north.

[10] Prior to the construction of the Puck Building, the site had been occupied by St. Catherine's Convent, which was built by the Order of the Sisters of Mercy in 1848.

[28] The southern elevation on Jersey Street is clad in plain brick and has a small number of window openings with iron shutters.

The lunettes are surrounded by round arches with slightly projecting edges, and there is a horizontal string course made of brownstone above the second story.

[28] Above the columns is an architrave bearing the words "Puck Building" in all-capital letters, with a console bracket below the center and a balustrade above it.

[9] At the sixth story of the building's northeast corner, the chamfer has a massive console bracket, which originally served as the base of a flagpole.

[32][39] A patterned brick course, corbels, a brownstone sill, and a cornice run horizontally above the seventh story of the original building.

[45] The ground (first) floor was originally used by the J. Ottman firm, and it also included a stair leading to the Puck company offices on the upper stories.

[59][60] The Puck Penthouses retain the spaces' original large windows, cast-iron columns, and vaulted brick ceilings.

[56] In addition, the doors are made of nickel and glass,[56][62] materials that were selected specifically to give the penthouses an industrial ambiance.

[50] Originally, Ottmann's lithograph firm was located on the ground floor, while the Puck offices upstairs were accessed by a separate lobby.

[75] That August, Keppler, Schwarzmann, and Ottmann acquired the site at 281 Mulberry Street, directly south of the Puck Building.

[14][80] At the time, the irregularly-shaped site on Mulberry Street contained a three-story tenement, which Keppler and his partners planned to demolish and replace with an annex to the Puck Building.

B. Schneider sold Keppler and Schwarzmann the site on the northwest corner of Mulberry and Jersey streets in March 1892.

[81] The same month, Thomas Weatherby sold four houses on the north side of Jersey Street, immediately west of Schneider's plot, to Keppler and Schwarzmann.

[14][21] Heavy braces measuring 60 feet (18 m) long were used to temporarily shore up the northern and eastern elevations, and part of the remaining structure's facade on Houston Street was also demolished and rebuilt.

[108][110] Other tenants in the late 1910s included the American Paper Mills,[111] clothing manufacturers Zeeman & Grossman,[112] Raymond Engineering Corporation, and a store operated by Olney & Warrin.

[120] An office stationery company, S. Novick & Son, occupied the second floor; its salesmen included former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Alger Hiss.

[42] Initially, there were plans to add residential space, but this was canceled due to high costs, as the owners had to pay the displaced commercial tenants $9 per square foot.

[49][50] The reopening was celebrated with a temporary exhibit on the history of Puck magazine,[135][136] which included artifacts from the building that were discovered during its renovation.

[146] The Pratt Institute opened its Manhattan Center campus on the building's second floor in 1986,[140][147] relocating several of its graphics and illustration departments there.

[173][174] Some materials such as wood ceilings, floor joists, and wainscoting were removed and reinstalled elsewhere within the storefront space, while equipment like flywheels and printing tablets was preserved.

[175] The storefront renovation was designed by the architecture firm of Callison and included an area that showcased the history of the Puck Building.

[178][179] At the time, there was high demand for luxury residences in SoHo,[181] and the Puck Building was among the neighborhood's most prominent structures.

[41] Jared Kushner was involved with the design of the building's new apartments, to the extent that he mapped out their layouts and selected the materials with which they were decorated.

[199] Kushner Companies replaced the penthouses' original brokerage, Sotheby's International Realty, with the Corcoran Group the same year.

[205] After NYU relocated part of its Wagner Center out of the building in 2023, about 30,000 square feet (2,800 m2) of its space was leased to the hedge fund Quadrature.

[50] In his 1994 book New York, a Guide to the Metropolis, Gerard Wolfe wrote that the Puck Building was "a fine example of the industrial Romanesque Revival style" of the late 19th century;[211] similarly, Eric Nash wrote in his 1995 book New York's 50 Best Secret Architectural Treasures that the Puck Building was a "premier example of the Rundbogenstil".