For decades, drivers heading onto the Queensboro Bridge may have noticed a curious three-story building tucked just beneath the on-ramp — a narrow brick structure with proportions that never quite matched its Midtown East neighbors.

Now listed for $10 million, the mixed-use building at 316 E. 59th St. has worn many identities over the past century, but none as memorable as its first: a 1930 small bakery called Home of the Gnomes that attempted to lure customers with a storybook façade — most memorably a gnome figure perched above the roofline and another stationed outside, posed mid-bite with a papier-mâché loaf.

The bakery’s collapse during the economic turmoil of the early 1930s ended its short-lived whimsy, but the structure’s eccentric charm endured as it cycled through an exterminat

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