Manhattan loft porn at 16 Jay Street / you know you want it

Apartment Therapy was my enabler, this time
I put the link about a beautifully done loft at 16 Jay Street (below) aside when it was featured on the Curbed March 9 Linkage (in good company!), intending to drool publicly about it soon. Next day, I saw that letter to the editor that I posted about yesterday (the March 13, the perils of real estate porn in Brooklyn about houses, or even in Manhattan about lofts) and I needed to reflect a little on the voyeuristic nature of so much of Manhattan real estate commentary.

(pause)

OK, that’s done!

The loft images you are about to see are so lovely that you may find yourself excited by them. If these graphics need to be redeemed in any way, be sure to read all the way through, where you will see some actual market analysis, a discussion of 2006 and 2010 sales in the building, and even some local commercial history. In case you need redeeming value….

Here’s the blurb from Apartment Therapy that accompanies 5 photos:

Located in the heart of Manhattan’s Tribeca district, this space was originally a bare fifty-by-eighty foot box. The designers took cues from the vernacular styles found in the neighborhood and used these industrial and modern elements to reinvent the space. The steel columns of the original structure created a natural grid, which the designers relaxed by using sliding panels and long bookshelves to connect the separate spaces. The result of this strategic design was a bright and livable loft unit.

The loft is the 2nd floor at 16 Jay Street, which sold for $5.2mm (a 9.5% premium!) on January 13, 2006, after this beautiful renovation had been done. The former owner commented on the AT thread that he had lived there from 2000 to 2005, and that he has since moved all those books twice more. I can’t find a floor plan anywhere, but the babble describes it as having 3 bedrooms and two baths. There are more photos on the architect’s website (definitely, be sure to click to enlarge).

The master suite is obviously on the back wall, which I assume is shared by the other bedrooms (as the loft is 50 feet wide). I am guessing that the kitchen is behind the screens to the left in the shots of the long dining table, but I am having trouble ‘reading’ these photos.

varying values nearby
I am not sure you can count on projecting that January 2006 sale of the loft to an increased current value, as that is certainly not what happened with the penthouse at 16 Jay Street. The 5th floor penthouse triplex sold on October 12, 2006 (ten months after the 2nd floor)  for $7.35mm, which was a 1.4% premium to the asking price. But when it was resold on February 1, 2010 it garnered ‘only’ $5.85mm. There are also images from that loft available on the web.

Let’s start with some video from a May 10, 2009 WNBC tv Open House NYC, which was shot in the penthouse; caution: there is a lot of “welcome back!” jollity, as the piece has been (severely) edited to include only shots of this loft. But better images are on that architect’s website (click on Projects, then Residential, then Kucka Sutter loft; don’t trip over the tricycle).

That loft is a completely different animal than the 2nd floor. The penthouse is a little larger (“4,400 sq ft”) but the triplex layout gives it a radically different sense of space. It seems that two levels were added to the (former) top of the building, creating two equal levels of about 1,700 sq ft and a smaller top floor with two terraces. With 6 (six!) bedrooms, there is an awfully thin market for space this size in any market conditions, but this penthouse was on the market during a wide range of market conditions, indeed.

Having been bought in October 2006 at $7.35mm, the owners decided to sell as quickly as April 12, 2008. As this was very, very, very close to The Peak, you’d think that they’d be able to get absolute top dollar for the loft. Right in theory, but not in execution, as they came to market at a price The Market did not like. $8.25mm was ‘only’ 12% above what they had paid in 18 months earlier, but it was clearly above what The Market preferred. Worse (for them) is that they sat at this price for 11 months, before dropping dramatically twice in March 2009 (first to $6.995mm and then to $6.495mm, a total of 21% off the starting price). When that did not work, the next drop was June 27, 2009 to $5.995mm, where they sat until signing the contract with the buyer who closed on February 1, 2010 at $5.85mm.

That ugly math is a sale at a 30% discount from where they started marketing and 20% down from what they had paid in October 2006. Which is a long way of saying that the eventual next sale of the 2nd floor might be at a discount from that January 2006 $5.2mm, especially if it were to happen soon.

the butter and egg district used to serve coffee
I have mentioned before that Duane Street still had butter and egg businesses when I lived in Tribeca in the early 1980s, but I did not remember that there was at least one still around on Jay Street then. The May 4, 1987 issue of New York Magazine confirmed that this building was where Hotel Bar Butter was converting 68 pound blocks of butter into bars and nickel ‘pats’ from 1947 to 1986.

Long before then, there was at least one very successful coffee merchant at 16 Jay Street from 1870, the Atlas Coffee Mills. The archives from the New York Times contain a May 3, 1901 piece about that merchant’s funeral (scroll about halfway down), which was noteworthy for the fact that the deceased merchant directed that a favorite stallion be brought to his funeral from a farm at 171 Street in the Bronx, and that the merchant left the horse a “very liberal” pension. The disposition of this guy’s estate was also the subject of a New York Times article on May 15, 1901, as there were some questions about conflicting wills.

I hope that is enough redeeming market and cultural value to justify a peak at this loft porn.

© Sandy Mattingly 2011