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The last time anyone rented an apartment in this five-story West Village walk-up, it was a one-bedroom listed back in 2019. The building appears to have sat vacant ever since. It’s finally getting a new occupant, but only one. Rather than eight households, the whole thing is being converted into a single-family house.
The building is 80 Horatio Street, a 19th-century brick tenement whose backyard runs up against the gardens of the townhouses on Jane Street. It traded for $10.25 million in a sale that closed last October, according to city records cited by Curbed, after what the buyer’s broker described as a bidding war. The buyer, represented by Matthew Lesser of Leslie J. Garfield, plans to live there.
The draw is the size. At 25 feet across, 80 Horatio is considerably wider than the typical New York City townhouse, which Lesser put at about 18 feet, and it’s deeper than most of them too. Buildings like that don’t come up often in the West Village, where the most coveted blocks have already been claimed by buyers combining two or three townhouses into one, and where landmarking rules out a lot of what’s left.
Plans filed with the Landmarks Preservation Commission keep the brick front largely as is, minus two things: the ground-floor retail space, which was added sometime after the building went up, and the fire escapes. The rear would be opened up with three large windows, in keeping with just about every luxury townhouse renovation in the city right now. When the proposal came before the LPC earlier this summer, the loss of the storefront was the biggest sticking point, per Curbed. Lesser told the site the finished house will look nothing like a townhouse from the street but will feel like one inside.
Turning a tenement into a mansion is rare, though not unheard of. Curbed points to 9 Minetta Lane, a former illegal hotel that was made over into an angular modern house a little over a decade ago and has since struggled to find a buyer, and to 45-47 East 3rd Street in the East Village, where a shipping heir converted a rent-stabilized 15-unit building into a family home after buying out the tenants.
Brokers who spoke with the site seemed to think 80 Horatio’s conversion was a no-brainer. The townhouse across the street, 83 Horatio, sold for $20.6 million, and at roughly $1,600 to $1,700 per square foot, one Douglas Elliman broker said the sale price wasn’t bad for a 25-footer in what he called the most expensive part of downtown. Nobody expected the building to stay a rental. As Dolly Lenz of Dolly Lenz Real Estate put it, someone was always going to gut it and turn it into condos or a single house.
