Big Ticket | Mansion in the Making for $45 Million
Featuring Ric Swezey's transaction at 27 Christopher Street.
An imposing brick-and-limestone building that has stood guard at a historic corner of Greenwich Village for more than a century and performed a series of humble if necessary services — Catholic school, nursing school, training center for one of the city’s oldest charities, New York Foundling — sold for $45 million and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records.
Owned since 2002 by New York Foundling, the building was listed for sale in April for $47.5 million by the veteran broker Dolly Lenz. The marketing plan suggested the property, zoned R-6, would most easily be repurposed as a single-family home, though a boutique hotel or condos were possible.
But in a New York City real estate market with an insatiable appetite for the enormous mansions of yesteryear, 27 Christopher Street, despite its utilitarian interior, sparked a bidding war. In its next phase, the four-story behemoth built in 1911 on a 60-by-70-foot lot at the corner of Waverly Place will be converted to a luxurious single-family residence, as Ms. Lenz had predicted.
“Disadvantaged children and families in New York will benefit on a grand scale from the Foundling’s difficult decision to sell this property,” said Bethany Lampland, the charity’s chief operating officer.
The landmark neo-Classical facade will stay, but the 19,000 square feet of interior space will be reinvented to suit the new owner, who bought it through a limited liability company, Villagefh. The building also has a small terrace at the back of the second story and 3,000 square feet of roof space with views in every direction. Ric Swezey of the Corcoran Group represented the buyer.
The week’s runner-up, at $30.9 million, was a 10-room penthouse at 1107 Fifth Avenue carved from a 54-room triplex built for the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1926. Apparently a direct transaction between the estate of Monique Uzielli, the Swiss aristocrat/art collector who owned it since 1958, and the buyers, the hedge fund manager Mark Kingdon and Anla Cheng Kingdon, the apartment has 4,780 square feet of terrace space.
Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.
Copyright © 2014 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Michael Appleton/The New York Times.