The $5750-a-Month Financial District Loft With Heated Bathroom Floors
by Brendan O’Connor
Welcome to Surreal Estate, a new column in which we will explore listings from the tumultuous New York City real estate market.
67 Liberty Street, #6
• $5,750/month
• 1,246 square feet
• 1 Bed, 1.5 bath (3.5 rooms)
If you weren’t aware, the Financial District, which is where the money is made by people who make money, is one of the hottest places to live in New York City. People are moving there, to live, it’s true. Especially people who already work there — and good for them, because it’s cold out. Seventeen residential buildings were under construction in the neighborhood in August 2013; a year later, the New York Times reported that “more than a dozen apartment buildings are on the way.”
One such building that people live in is 67 Liberty Street, formerly a five-story office building to which fourteen luxurious floors were added “through creative application of zoning regulations.” The non-union project, about equidistant from the 9/11 Memorial to the west and the South Street Seaport to the east, was completed in 2013. While the second floor is available for commercial use, the rest of the building is residential — lofts to which you are taken directly by a private elevator.
The couple who moved into #6 — purchased for $1.146 million in 2013 — added recessed lighting and exposed the brick on one wall of the living room, which faces west and looks into an office building across the street. “There were just two sconces on either wall,” Sarah, who lives in the apartment with her husband and was home sick, told me. “It looked like a Vietnamese nail salon.”
“People don’t really expect to find this kind of space in this neighborhood. A loft? In the Financial District?” Jackie Roth, the broker, said. “So you’re going to help us.” Sarah, who asked me not to use her last name, likes that the loft takes up the whole floor of the building. “We’re not sharing our neighbors’ home. It’s like our own private oasis,” Sarah said. “I like that,” Roth said. “’Private oasis.’” For further privacy, Sarah and her husband added wood-paneled flower boxes around the terrace on the other side of the apartment. Also, the bathroom has heated floors, and there is a garbage chute.
For her part, Sarah loves living in the Financial District. Her husband works on Wall Street for a small commodities brokerage, so his commute is easy. The couple is moving because the firm is opening an office in Puerto Rico — which enacted tax incentives for traders, investors, and financial institutions in 2012 — but she says when they eventually move back to New York, they’ll likely come back to FiDi. “You walk down the street, and see a mom with a carriage and a businessman with a briefcase,” Sarah said.
“I like to think that every neighborhood has a soul,” Roth said.
The average one bedroom in the neighborhood is only six hundred and fifty square feet for around thirty-eight hundred dollars a month, Roth said. We all agreed that’s not nearly enough space. At one thousand, two hundred a square feet, “this is living,” Roth said. “You really get good value for your money here.” The apartment has apparently generated a lot of interest from artists. They like the high ceilings (ten-and-a-half feet, nine-and-a-half in the hallway). An equivalent space in Soho, meanwhile, would go for seven to ten thousand per month. “But you can’t live in Soho if you want to walk anywhere,” Sarah said. And, “Why pay so much money to live in Tribeca when you can just walk there in five minutes?”
“There’s never any trash on the streets. I’m anal, and I walk around the Village like, ugh,” Roth said. “But here, it’s very clean!” Sarah agreed with Roth’s assessment. “Every day when it’s nice out there are guys spraying down the sidewalk on this block,” she said. “There’s the Federal Reserve right there. So.”
It’s an exciting time for the area. “The Financial District isn’t an isolated neighborhood anymore, it’s becoming part of the Lower Manhattan that everybody wants to be a part of,” Roth said. Sarah agreed. If you want to live in the city, she said, “There’s nowhere else to go — it’s here, or Harlem.”
Move-in is mid-February or beginning of March, and there is no condo application or application fee.
20 West 119th Street #A
• $5,000/month
• 1,514 square feet
• 3 beds, 2.5 baths (4 rooms)
There is a townhouse in Harlem — or, what is now being referred to by some as “Central Harlem” — that, if you are a corporate entity, you can rent for eleven thousand, five hundred dollars per month. For the past two years, broker Alex Theodorou told me, the owners of 20 West 119th Street have been renting this building, each unit fully furnished, to a German company, whose employees stay there during business trips to New York.
Theodorou met me outside while waiting for clients — a couple who have been renting elsewhere in the neighborhood and need to move out. The owner of their building, who lives in Brazil, has decided to move back to New York. They were looking at the largest unit: a three bedroom, three-and-a-half bath home that spans two floors and four rooms that is listed at five thousand dollars per month. (Incidentally, renting each apartment individually at the listed rates will only generate ten thousand dollars per month, less than the corporate lease.)
The current owners of the building acquired it for nine hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The owners of 20 West 119th recently turned down an offer to more than double their purchase price, because they think they can triple it, a source with knowledge of the (failed) deal told me. (Another building on the same block, 36 West 119th, is for sale for $1.5 million.)
“I don’t want to say the neighborhood is changing,” Theodorou said. “That sounds so bad. You’re just seeing life in these neighborhoods again. They’re being recognized for what they are.” He praised the architecture of the buildings in the area, comparing it to the Upper West Side. “Manhattan is beautiful, and it cleans up so nice.”
“Everybody has apartments,” Theodorou said. “Now they want townhouses. And why not?” We looked out the window to the backyard. “96th street and below you’re not touching anything like this.” When his clients arrived, they were surprised and not especially happy to find me in there. “We’re not international investors,” the man growled when I asked about their building’s returning owners. “We just keep moving further north.”
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Photo of 67 Liberty Street courtesy of Jackie Roth; photo of 20 West 119th via StreetEasy