By Dennis Holt
It has been called the “wedding cake� building or the “gingerbread house,� but never “the pace-setter,� although that is what it’s become.

We speak of 75 Livingston St., taking up the corner of Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, whose top has been enshrouded in wire mesh for what seems like forever.

The rooftop is peaked with what seems to be a square church bell tower, but there is no bell therein. Eagle photographer Mario Belluomo recently discovered an original sales folder in a discard stack of books and we take note of its history in this report and why it has become a pace-setter, although the pace was very slow.

This 32-story building with what planners now call “set backs� was built in 1927 as an office building primarily for an insurance company and it became a major part of the Brooklyn skyline along with other Court Street buildings until that skyline was added to in the late 1980s. Sixty years of dominance isn’t bad these days.

Being a pace-setter started in 1982 when 75 Livingston was converted into a co-op residential building, the tallest co-op in Brooklyn at the time. It took about 25 years for others to follow suit but recently two other well-known office buildings have become housing.

These are the famous Williamsburgh Bank building, now known as One Hanson Place — a name which old timers pay no attention to — and the Bell Tell Lofts, the classic art deco building on Willoughby, once the Brooklyn home of Ma Bell in MetroTech.

The sales folder, pictured in this report, included the basic floor plan for the first 13 floors or 65 of the 105 apartments. There are five units on each of those floors. The total square footage of the building is about 180,000 square feet.

Inside the sales folder was a price sheet dated, June 1982 and the numbers then can lead to drooling now. For example, apartment 3-A at 1,644 square feet went for $48.05 per square foot. The penthouse duplex at 3,000 square feet cost a sterling $111.33 per square foot.

The most expensive apartment in 1982 seems to be apartment 29-A at 1,716 square feet coming out to $117.13 per foot.

We also find that financing is through the Dime Savings Bank of New York with a 30-year roll-over mortgage, 5 percent below bank rate and all this guaranteed for the first three years to “preferred customers.�

Ah, the good, old days.

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