The Rise of the Tenemansion

The Rise of the Tenemansion 80 Horatio, the brick building with the fire escape, is slated to become a single-family mansion, a bellwether of where real estate is going in the West Village. Photo: Google Maps In the last few years, it’s become increasingly difficult to lay claim to a good chunk of real estate in the West Village. On the most desirable blocks, billionaires have been picking up two, sometimes three, townhouses at a clip, combining them into frankenmansions that often sprawl 40 feet or more across. Developers, meanwhile, have made off with nearly all the old parking garages, odd lots, and historic buildings that haven’t yet been claimed by hedge funders like Steve Cohen. Widespread landmarking also limits the options. A buyer has to get creative. Which may explain the conversion of 80 Horatio, a pre-law five-story brick tenement building in a prime pocket of the neighborhood, into a single-family house. While townhouse conversions are a dime a dozen in the West Village — it’s now practically unheard of for multi-family houses to become anything but single-family homes when they change hands — tenement conversions are something of a new frontier. Maybe not for long, though. “It’s very hard to find a 25-foot wide building that can be used as a home in the West Village,” says Matthew Lesser, the broker at Leslie J. Garfield who represented the buyer of 80 Horatio (on average, most New York City townhouses are about 18 feet wide). The owner, in this case, plans to live in the place themselves. In addition to its attractive width, the 8-unit building is deeper than most townhouses and its backyard abuts the very lovely gardens of the townhouses on Jane Street, several of which are rumored to be in the midst of their own franken assemblages. When the property went on the market last year, there was “tremendous demand,” says Lesser, which set off a bidding war. His client paid $10.25 million, according to city records, in a sale that closed last October. The property, a 19th-century building with a handsome, quintessentially Village exterior — retail space on the first floor, fire escapes zigzagging up the brick front — was listed vacant, which it seems to have been for some time, with the last rental listing, for a one-bedroom with a garishly sleek kitchen renovation, dating back to 2019. “Facade-wise, it will be very atypical of a townhouse, but the interiors will feel exactly like a luxury townhouse when it’s completed,” Lesser says. Plans filed with the Landmarks Preservation Commission show a front facade that will remain largely intact, minus the retail space and fire escapes. (At a LPC meeting earlier this summer, the loss of the retail space, which was added sometime after the building’s completion, was the largest point of contention.) The backside would, in the current custom of luxury townhouses everywhere, be blown out for a big window. Three big windows, in fact. Plans filed with the LPC show how the front facade and rear will look. Illustration: Landmarks Preservation Commission Brokers say that tenement to mansion conversions are rare. A little over a decade ago, 9 Minetta Lane, an old law tenement being used as an illegal hotel, was made over into a very modern, weirdly-angled single-family home (not very successfully it seems: the property has bounced around the market for a number of years). And a few decades ago in the East Village, Greek shipping heir Alistair Economakis turned a rent-stabilized, 15-unit tenement at 45-47 E. 3rd Street into a single-family mansion for himself, his wife and their two kids, displacing renters via buyouts and a loophole that allows an owner to reclaim stabilized units for his personal use. Unusual though it may be, every broker I talked to thought that 80 Horatio’s transformation was a swell idea. Overdue, even. Dolly and Jenny Lenz of Dolly Lenz Real Estate told me that when they listed 27 Christopher Street, a free-standing Catholic school turned home of the social service nonprofit New York Foundling, in 2014, other brokers found the $47.5 million asking price laughably high. The exterior was attractive and the location, on the corner of Waverly, ideal, but the interiors were a mess, with 7-foot ceilings from an ill-advised former reno, and other brokers thought they’d be lucky to get $18 million. But then two hedge funders got into a bidding war and it sold for $45 million. The buyer, biotech hedge fund billionaire Felix Baker, has since turned 27 Christopher into a six-bedroom mansion with a 50-foot lap pool that would sell for upwards of $100 million if it hit the market today. “When trophy mansions do not exist, sophisticated buyers create them,” Lenz says. “It’s very slim pickings in the West Village and Tribeca. People are really looking for anything — is there any decrepit building I can do something with?” “Converting 80 Horatio makes perfect sense,” says Christopher Riccio, a Douglas Elliman broker, who sold the townhouse across the street, 83 Horatio, for $20.6 million. George Vanderploeg, a townhouse broker at Douglas Elliman, pointed out that $1,600 or $1,700 per square foot — what 80 Horatio’s sales price works out to — isn’t bad, especially for a 25-footer. “It’s the most expensive part of downtown,” he says. “I can see why something like that might work down there. You could take the fire escape off the front and have something that doesn’t look too strange as a single-family.” In any event, in a neighborhood where a double-wide townhouse sold for $72.5 million a few years ago, no one thought that there was any chance that a buyer would have kept 80 Horatio a rental, even if there are plenty of West Village girls who would happily pay $7,500 a month for a one-bedroom there. As overheated as the neighborhood rental market is, the sales market is where the real money is — it’s a billionaire’s game now. “People figure out the highest and best use,” says Lenz. “Someone was always going to gut it and make it into condos or a single-family house.” The Rise of the Tenemansion Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.