New York City’s Automated City Register Information System ​(ACRIS) has forty-one separate entries for 300 Canal Street, New York, NY 10013. Each entry relates to an official filing that pertains to the ownership of the property.

The first entry is a Standard N.Y.B.T.U. Form 8002 Bargain and Sale Deed made on ‘the 7th day of July, nineteen hundred and sixty-six,’ which was filed by the Lohema Realty Corp. (’principal place of business at 302 Canal Street’) and one Lloyd Weiss, a resident of 2026 Ocean Avenue, Brooklyn. Other than these two addresses, we learn no further details about Lohema Realty Corp. or Lloyd Weiss. But a typed description on the form gives us a schematic account of the property’s early life:

… running through from Canal Street to Lispenard Street, bounded on one side by a lot now or late of the property of Benjamin Hide and on the other side by a lot now or late the property of Elbert Anderson, containing on Canal Street, 25’ 6” and on Lispenard Street 25’; on the easterly side 54’6” and on the westerly side 59’5”, be the same more or less, the premises above described being known on Canal Street, formerly as No. 51, late 49 and now as No. 300 Canal Street, being the same premises conveyed to John R. Graham and David S. Page by Daniel P. Ingraham, Jr. by Referee’s deed bearing date July 21, 1865 …

Also interesting is the phrase, rendered in all-CAPS near the bottom of the form: TO HAVE AND TO HOLD, which is what the party of the second part, the heirs or successors and assigns of the party of the second part are agreeing to do ‘forever.’ The existing mortgage is listed as $22,000 dollars.

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Lloyd Weiss, it seems, had a relationship of some kind with a Curt M. White Co., Inc. (’a domestic corporation’). On August 17th, 1966—only a month and 10 days after receiving the deed from Lohema Realty Corp.—Weiss is listed as transferring the deed, in the name of Curt M. White Co., Inc., to a Shareen Realty, Corp., while in a separate, simultaneous filing, Shareen Realty, Corp. transferred the property’s mortgage (which they must have held?) to Curt M. White Co., Inc.

On the 7th day of September, 1966, another Standard N.Y.B.T.U Form 8002 was filed, this time by Lloyd Weiss, transferring the deed to Curt M. White Co., who now listed its ‘place of business’ as 300 Canal Street.



 

The film is a continuous zoom, which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot with a fixed camera from one end of an 80-foot loft, shooting the other end, a row of windows and the street. This, the setting, and the action which takes place there are cosmically equivalent.

The above quotation is Michael Snow describing his 1967 film Wavelength. The ‘80-foot loft’ referred to was Snow’s then-studio, on one of the upper floors at 300 Canal, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call the building one of the film’s main characters. As the camera’s lens slowly zooms in on what we eventually see is a photograph of waves tacked to a wall, we spend most of the film’s running time getting to know the room intimately: the four massive, light-filled windows; the silver radiator in the right hand corner; the empty and somehow sinister bookshelf on the left of the frame; the old-fashioned newspaper man's desk with its rotary dial phone; the tin ceiling tiles; and a chair upholstered in bright yellow leatherette.

Snow continues:

The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by 4 human events including a death. The sound on these occasions is sync sound, music and speech, occurring simultaneously with an electronic sound, a sine wave, which goes from its lowest (50 cycles per second) note to its highest (12000 c.p.s.) in 40 minutes. It is a total glissando while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum, which attempts to utilise the gifts of both prophecy and memory, which only film and music have to offer.

Though the sine wave is always present, what we remember most after the fact is the moment when The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is piped in on a radio whose dangling chord we can see plugged into the wall. The film does this more than once: it gives us foreground action—a blaring pop song, a mysterious woman, one side of a conversation about a possible murder—each of which are actually background to the main event.

Wavelengths was shot over the space of one week in December of 1966—so roughly three months after Lloyd Weiss transferred the deed from his name to that of Curt M. White Co. The ACRIS database records no other human events in relation to 300 Canal until April 12, 1993 when the Landmarks Preservation Commission of the City of New York designated an area encompassing the property as the Tribeca East Historic District.

In the early 2000’s the carousel of deed and mortgage transfers began again: Shareen Realty Corp. to a David Sharoff to Shareen Realty Properties, LLC to Aztec Associates to 300 Canal, LLC back to Aztec Associates, LLC to the Bank of Smithtown, then the issuing of a certificate in the name of Royal Abstract of New York, LLC—seemingly a new mortgage—People’s United Bank’s name appears, as does Capital One National Association, 415 Associates, Gemini 415, 415 Associates LLC C/O United American Land, LLC and PT ATL SPV Grantor Trust.

Most recently, in May of 2024, the Israel Discount Bank of New York is listed as having provided a mortgage consolidation. The building’s current market value is roughly between $3,000,000 and $3,500,000—up nearly 8% from last year’s valuations.

_{March 2025, New York City}

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