The old, four-story garage building at 125 Perry St. is on the market for sale as conversion into luxury condos or even as a single-family mansion.
BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | With its weathered brick facade, the Perry Garage, at Perry and Greenwich Sts., blends in with the West Village’s historic streetscape, and of course also serves a functional purpose as a parking garage.
But, amid the West Village’s superheated real estate market, the four-story property, at 125 Perry St., is up for sale for high-end residential conversion and is being brokered by Massey Knakal Realty Services.
Changing the landscape physically, and soon economically, the project at 150 Charles St. will add 98 super-high-end residences.
According to a sales brochure on the property, “The subject currently consists of nearly 40,000 existing square feet that offer an unusually large canvas for a developer or user to execute a wide variety of potential visions, from boutique condominiums to mixtures of multifamily and high-end retail to a one-of-a-kind single family residence.”
In addition, the brochure notes, the building comes with hard-to-get curb cuts, “allowing prospective developers or users to deliver on-site parking — a highly prized and very scarce commodity within the West Village for which the willingness to pay is enormous.”
Although the brochure notes one potential option is to raze the property and build anew, the site is within the Greenwich Village Historic District, so any such changes would need approval by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Also shown are several ideas for how the existing building’s facade could be altered, which again would need L.P.C. approval.
The brochure notes that a chunk of the building’s rear could be removed to create a backyard and that this square footage could then be added atop the building as a setback fifth-story penthouse, again requiring L.P.C. approval.
One interested buyer reportedly wants to convert the classic garage into a boutique hotel. According to a representative for another interested developer, the old garage is actually currently owned by the West Village Houses.
Finding a buyer shouldn’t be hard. The marketing materials note that “data confirms that there is an insatiable demand for housing within just a few blocks of 125 Perry St.”
Indeed, the brochure offers a truly eye-opening look at the current state of the West Village’s through-the-roof real estate market.
Three years ago, a five-bedroom penthouse apartment at nearby Superior Ink, at West and W. 12th Sts., sold for a whopping $31.5 million.
“It was delivered as a white box for prospective buyers to build out the space themselves,” the brochure notes, “and sold at a record price solely based on its amazing West Village location in a marquee building.”
Similarly, at 150 Charles St., currently under construction, a pair of five-bedroom penthouse apartments are under contract for sale for a cool $35 million and $34 million. And at least six four-bedroom apartments there are under contract for an average of $15 million. The building’s units were almost 75 percent sold as of a few months ago.
Meanwhile, sales have been booming over at the Abingdon, the former Village Nursing Home, at Hudson and W. 12th Sts., which has been converted into 10 luxury homes. In May, a seven-bedroom apartment there sold for $29.7 million, while a three-bedroom residence sold for $22.4 million.
Meanwhile, recent sales at the Richard Meier-designed glass towers at 165 Charles St. at West St. — a mere $5 million or $6 million on average — seem like, well, chump change compared with the mega-sales of the larger, multi-bedroom apartments at some of the behemoth newcomers mentioned above.
Ironically, it was the Meier towers — and of course the development of the new Hudson River Park — built in the early 2000s that originally blew open the doors to the new so-called “Gold Coast” along the Village waterfront.
In short, the Perry Garage brochure notes, the formerly funky, bohemian enclave of the West Village now ranks with the “most exclusive submarkets” in Manhattan, including the Upper East Side and Central Park South, and is “now commanding pricing which will most likely outpace these other submarkets in years to come; making it the most expensive and exclusive place to live in all of Manhattan.”
As for 150 Charles St., opponents at the West Village Houses in July lost their challenge at the Board of Standards and Appeals. The opponents argued that Steven Witkoff, the developer of the new 16-story, 98-unit project, was supposed to preserve significantly more of the base of the former Whitehall Storage warehouse than he did. They contend Witkoff agreed to save all the columns and floors about 30 feet in from the old building’s sides, but that he only preserved a mere, flimsy “lattice” of the former facade. But the B.S.A. ruled in favor of the developer.
A Witkoff representative said, “The Board of Standards and Appeals’ unanimous decision affirmed previous determinations of the Department of Buildings that the construction of 150 Charles St. is proceeding within the approvals granted by the City of New York. Construction on the site is well underway consistent with all of the approved plans.”
