By Trish Hall

The advertisement for the building near the South Street Seaport and the Fulton Fish Market characterized the place as a wreck. Intrigued, Travis Messinger and Darin Ronning made an appointment with the broker. But, too curious to wait for their official viewing, they went to Beekman Street to take a look.

The only trouble was, they couldn’t figure out which building it might be. “The whole block was complete wrecks,” Mr. Ronning said.

There are wrecks, though, and there are wrecks. When they saw the property the next day with Liz Dworkin of Eychner Associates, who says she specializes in “weird, funky buildings,” they could see that it would have to be gutted. The building had been a fish smokehouse,, supposedly the last in the area, and one floor was still a vast blackened concrete oven with a fireplace at one end. It smelled smoky and looked as if it was covered with tar.

At the time the two men were living in a duplex on Horatio Street in the meat-packing district, and a vegetarian friend put the prospect of the move in context: I would rather, she told them, walk around dead fish than dead cows.

That was one way to look at it.

For more specific advice, they brought in Christine Inukai, an architect who had designed a new kitchen for their duplex. She walked through all four floors of the building – and she was told later that she didn’t’ say a single word. But when she was finished, she told Mr. Messinger and Mr. Ronning that she thought they should go ahead.

“A lot of people think they want to buy a building,” she said, “but they don’t have the resources or the energy. I knew them, and they’re great at taking on challenges.”

Among the resources required are money, of course, but also endless patience and a certain kind of faith in the outcome. For instance, almost immediately, everything was torn out of the building, a circumstance that might have dismayed other buyers. “At one point, there were no floors and no ceilings,” Ms. Inukai said.

And although the two men bought the building in 1997, they weren’t able to move in until 1999. The purchase price, $450,000, was less than the $582,000 cost of the renovation. And while the building was under construction, they had to pay about $30,000 a year in taxes, because levies on commercial on residential, “We remember that as the year of taxes,” Mr. Ronning said. (The taxes are much lower now – about $5,000 a year they said – because the building is primarily residential.)

Initially, Mr. Messinger, 30, and Mr. Ronning, 35, who met in Minnesota and moved to New York in 1992, had been looking for a retail space to rent so they could open a home accessories store. Mr. Messinger was working for an antiques store in the Village and Mr. Ronning was a graphic designer for an investment bank. They were discouraged by high rents for small stores and were attracted to the smokehouse because it offered a chance to live and work in the same place.

With their architect, Ms. Inukai, they drew up a plan that transformed the budilign into a residence and a store, with their home accessories store, with their home accessories store, which includes a café, on the ground floor, a rental tenant on the second and their duplex, with a roof deck, above. The configuration of their duplex is reversed from the usual, with two bedrooms and a den on their lower floor and the living room, office and kitchen above.

“I couldn’t see having private space between the living room and the roof,” Ms. Inukai said. Each floor is 1,000 square feet, with now yard.

For Mr. Ronning, the building is a vast improvement over their duplex on Horatio Street, which was dark because it was on the ground-floor and basement levels. Now they have light everywhere, in part because, unlike town houses, which are narrow and deep, their building is wide and shallow, and thus drenched with light on both north and south.

On the front, the building still says “fresh, salt and smoked fish,” a sign that the Landmarks Preservation Commission wanted retained (the building is part of the Southe Street Seaport Historic District). On the ground floor, they have opened their store, Pepper Jones. The café is a relaxed place to sit, and the store offers stylish objects, mostly priced below $100. Mr. Messinger and Mr. Ronning say that they get a lot of neighborhood residents in their store and café but that it is also popular with the many Europeans, Japanese and South Americans who visit the South Street Seaport, which is across the street but feels very separate, in part because a chain blocks cars from entering the seaport area.

The two men are big fans of their new neighborhood, which isn’t City Hall and certainly isn’t TriBeCa. Asked what they call it, Mr. Messinger said, “We say, ‘Below the Brooklyn Bridge.’” They know a lot of their neighbors, and they say that because there are so few residents in the area, everyone is very friendly. “I think I like it because it’s very un-New York,” Mr. Messinger said. “You don’t fight pedestrian traffic.”

Mr. Ronning is happy is the area even though he is allergic to fish. The neighborhood reminds him of the way Horatio Street was when they moved there in the early 1990’s. “The average age was 60 to 65, and it was a stoop-sitting neighborhood,” he said. “It turned into a supermodel neighborhood overnight.”

Now they feel they’ve regained that casual neighborly feeling. And they have become true Below the Brooklyn Bridgers. “Now it feels weird to go above Canal,” Mr. Messinger said.

Despite the time and money they had to put into the building to make it theirs, they had it easier than the first owner. Before the building was built in 1885 as a coffee warehouse, its site was under water. The buyer had to pay for the site and then fill it in. Even in the current real estate market, that would be unusual.