To passers-by, a building that’s considerably shorter than the ones around it may be little more than a curious feature of a streetscape.
But the odd-fitting structure could also be a shrewd real estate strategy. Indeed, landlords often depend upon under-built real estate to serve as a type of placeholder until a block appreciates in value. Making the wait easier is the fact that rents collected from the spaces, usually retail berths, are often just enough to cover basic costs — hence the industry term for such sites: “taxpayer buildings.”
A low-slung site giving way to an apartment complex in the East Village at East Second Street and First Avenue may show the taxpayer approach at work.
Romah Management Corp., an investment arm of the Ashourzadeh family, acquired the three buildings that make up the corner, Nos. 33, 35 and 37 First Ave., in 1984 for $282,000, according to the city register. Although the neighborhood was considered rougher-edged back then, the price can still seem rock-bottom cheap even when adjusting for inflation. It is equivalent to about $850,000 today.
Slightly different pizza-makers and masseuses have leased the addresses’ spaces. But true to taxpayer form, the sites haven’t changed much at all in the four decades since.
That’s not to say that the surrounding area hasn’t sharply transformed, however. Decades of gentrification, assimilation and investment have turned a neighborhood that was a first-stop for immigrants in the early 20th century and later a low-cost bohemian enclave into one of Lower Manhattan’s trendiest neighborhoods today.
And the reinvention has unsurprisingly powered a rise in real estate values, even in recent years. The East Village’s current median sale price is $1.2 million, a 75% bump from 2010, the oldest year available, according to StreetEasy data. Rents, too, have shot up over the same time period, to $3,800 a month from $2,500 a month, a gain of 50%, the site said.
Recognizing how much the East Village has evolved since the Reagan years, Romah might have decided that its holdings at Nos. 33-37 should be taxpayers no more. (Not every structure on the site is a taxpayer, however. No. 37, which Romah will also raze, is a five-story former rental building.)
In the last few weeks, the firm began prepping the site for a 22-unit development that will be a market-rate rental, said Romah principal Manouchechr Ashourzadeh, who goes by Manny, in a brief interview. But he otherwise declined to comment on the history of the site, which will now have the address 88 E. Second St. and also feature a storefront. Most notably, perhaps, the project at seven stories will clock in at roughly the same size as its neighbors.
It’s not Romah’s only effort to cash in on its taxpayers. The firm is attempting a similar makeover at a nearby parcel at East Fifth Street and Avenue D. That multi-lot corner site, which Romah started acquiring in 2007, includes a single-story building that once contained a supermarket. Romah wants to redevelop it into a 9-story, 64-unit apartment building, according to a permit application filed with the Department of Buildings in March.
33 First Ave.
In the mid-19th century, a fire devoured a soap factory that once stood here. A few years later, in 1878, an elevated subway line went up along First, casting shadows and possibly discouraging development. The short building on this corner, more diminutive than nearby structures, seems to date to sometime after the subway’s arrival. (The elevated tracks, part of a Second Avenue line, which confusingly ran its trains along First downtown, was demolished in 1942.) In recent years, a laundry leased No. 33’s ground floor while a massage parlor called Waterfront Spa rented its upstairs level. In early April, wrecking crews had reduced the building to brick walls, as landlord Romah Management Corp. prepares to raze the structure and two others on the block to develop a 7-story, 22-unit apartment building. Romah, a real estate entity associated with the Ashourzadeh family, appears to have pursued a classic “taxpayer” strategy with the site: collect rents for a bare-bones space to cover property costs while holding out until a neighborhood improves, then take advantage of allowable zoning for a new development.
35 First Ave.
Landlord Romah does not know why the northwestern corner of East Second Street and First Avenue is under-built compared to its surroundings. But a major event in April 1863 appears to have altered the face of the block. The Allan Hay & Co., a block-sized factory that said it made “family soaps of superior quality and uniform finish,” suffered from a fire that caused $200,000 in damages and destroyed its block-long, multi-story site, according to news reports from the time. Tenement-style apartment buildings seem to have quickly filled in most of the holes on the block left by the burned buildings. But for unknown reasons, the corner was not similarly developed back then. In the 1940s, No. 35 housed an A&P grocery store, photos show. Decades later, a series of pizza shops leased the narrow single-story structure. In March, city officials gave Romah the green light to raze the building.
37 First Ave.
This building, which is also part of Romah’s development site, will perhaps represent the biggest loss when it goes. A five-story former tenement, No. 37 once had eight apartments, even though none appear to have been rent-stabilized, according to state housing records. The last to rent, in 2021, was a studio that asked $1,700 a month. Back in 1984, when the neighborhood was far less gentrified, Romah bought the building and three others near it for $282,000, according to the city register. For many years, a Chinese restaurant, New Double Dragon, occupied its sidewalk level berth. But in the mid-1970s, the narrow space housed an Indian restaurant, one of many to emerge from a hub of Indian cuisine centered on East Sixth Street (though most were owned by immigrants from Sylhet, Bangladesh). In 1968 the Ahmed family opened the first such spot, Shah Bagh at 320 E. Sixth St., which today features Japanese eatery AOI Kitchen. Similarly, most of the two-dozen curry-centric restaurants that packed the area in its 1990s heyday are gone. Meanwhile, the Department of Buildings approved No. 37 for demolition on March 18.
84 E. Second St.
This 5-story, 8-unit Italianate-style rental building is owned by the same developer now busy at the corner, Romah Management Corp., which bought it from the firm Divot Co. in 1984 as part of its bulk purchase that also included Nos. 33, 35 and 37 First Ave. Stretching a deep 60 feet into its lot, No. 84 appears to offer peeks of the nearby New York City Marble Cemetery from its upper floors. A two-bedroom, one-bath unit in the walkup building was asking $4,300 a month last summer. In 1940, the building’s two retail spaces offered a men’s clothing store and grocery, according to a photo of No. 84 taken as part of a Great Depression-era program to document every single New York building. In recent decades, the westernmost berth appears to have been colonized as an apartment, a not uncommon occurrence during the neighborhood’s hardscrabble past. But a vintage clothing store opened about a decade ago, and a sushi restaurant is there today. The right berth, meanwhile, appears to be used by Romah as an office. This year, city tax officials put No. 84’s market value at $4.6 million, meaning it would likely sell for $9 million if put up for sale. That is down from No. 84’s $5.4 million valuation in 2022, records show, though on par with its pre-Covid price.
60 E. Second St.
Discovering nearly an acre of tranquil green space in the middle of a city block may seem like the stuff of urban fantasies. But the grass and trees that beckon through the wrought-iron fence posts at this address are no dream. They are part of the New York City Marble Cemetery, which was incorporated in 1831 and became an early beneficiary of local landmark protections in 1969. Though the walled-off oasis has a bit of a trapped-in-amber feel, the organization is still active. Its most recent internment happened on July 7, 2020, when Helen D. Roosevelt, a Covid victim, joined several previous members of her well-known clan. (Born Helen Sparrow, Roosevelt married John Roosevelt, a relative of former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, in 1959.) Other Roosevelts have bounced around a bit, like James Roosevelt, who was buried at Marble Cemetery from 1863 to 1876 before being relocated to Midtown’s Roosevelt Hospital (now Mount Sinai West), only to be re-interred in the Village again in 1995, according to the nonprofit organization’s own meticulous history. Others with White House ties, though, left never to return, like James Monroe, the fifth U.S. president, who was at Marble Cemetery from 1831 to 1858 before being packed up for Virginia. Monroe lay in vault 147, which is near the center aisle, about four rows back.
29 First Ave.
Designed by William Jose, a locally prolific German-born architect who was also behind Avenue A’s Pyramid Club, this five-story brick-and-terracotta building opened in 1871, according to historian Francis Morrone. In 1918, when its neighborhood was awash in waves of European immigration, the ground-floor retail space welcomed a hardware store that’s currently the appliance emporium Gringer & Sons; later expanding, it today also vends fridges, ranges and air conditioners in next-door 27 First as well. The store’s striking ruby-and-cobalt neon sign was the work of Charles Karsch, a Russian immigrant who also lent his touch to the shimmering shingle hanging at the West Village’s White Horse Tavern. The Forman family owned the site for years, according to the city register, but sold the property in 1982 for $150,000 (about $500,000 in 2024 dollars) to developer Mobile Realty Co., which converted the upstairs rentals into co-ops, records show. But the 22-unit elevator building, which uses the address 87 E. Second St., has sold slowly, as some units change hands only after longtime renters depart. In fact, a renovated two-bedroom unit long owned by the sponsor traded this winter for $1.2 million, according to StreetEasy.
24 First Ave.
Some sites seem to embrace the status quo for generations. Others cram a whirlwind of existences into a short span. The modest mid-block prewar building that formerly stood at this site was a Russian bath house in the mid-20th century, and a few decades later, it had become Gordon’s, a sort of pool-themed single-room occupancy hotel. Cots, which could be rented for $10 a week, were popular with “truck drivers, dock workers and drifters,” according to a 1964 article in The New York Times. The Club Baths, which served a gay male clientele, flourished afterward in the 1970s and 1980s, before Hayne Suthon bought the property, which angles through to East Second Street, for $3 million in 1986. Suthon, a tax lawyer turned restaurateur, opened the Ancient Rome-themed restaurant Cave Canem (Latin for “beware of dog”) a year later. But Suthon’s follow-up act, as of 1993, was probably the site’s highest-profile occupant: Lucky Cheng’s, an Asian eatery staffed by drag queens and trans women. Downstairs was a bar, Stella’s, where one of the old baths was reinvented as an oversized goldfish bowl. In 2018, Brooklyn-based Rybak Development purchased the entire property for $11.5 million, according to the city register, and razed it for The 101 Condo, a 7-story, 22-unit offering completed in 2022 that earned Rybak $43 million, according to its offering plan. A high-end Indian restaurant, Bungalow, opened on its ground floor in March. Lucky Cheng’s, meanwhile, has rotated through different homes in Times Square since Suthon died in 2014 and currently lends its name to a dinner-and-drag show at Laurie Beechman Theater on West 42nd Street.
C. J. Hughes , 2024-04-09 12:03:04
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