A neighbor buys the landmarked Isaac T. Hopper Home on 2nd Avenue

For the first time in 150 years, 110 Second Ave., the landmarked Isaac T. Hopper House between Sixth Street and Seventh Street, has a new owner. 

The Women's Prison Association (WPA) had owned the property since 1874. The 8,372-square-foot property is a designated New York City Landmark and is on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Yesterday, Denham Wolf Real Estate Services, Hirschen Singer & Epstein LLP, and their client, WPA, announced that Self Reliance New York Federal Credit, which owns the building next door, will expand its East Village footprint by purchasing No. 110 for $7.4 million. 

The credit union, which provides financial services to the Ukrainian American community, plans to renovate and adapt the building for administrative and community needs.

The Hopper House most recently served as a 38-bed transitional shelter dedicated to formerly incarcerated and at-risk women and their children. 

In December 2020, the townhouse sustained significant physical damage from a six-alarm fire on the SE corner of Second Avenue and Seventh Street. The fire destroyed the neighboring Middle Collegiate Church and displaced the shelter's residents and staff.

Following a review of the damaged property, "WPA determined that a sale of the property would be most conducive to the building's restoration and the organization's programmatic continuity." No. 110 arrived on the market in February 2023 with a $7.1 million ask. 

Here's some history of No. 110, built in 1837-1838, via Village Preservation: 

This three-and-a-half-story Greek Revival structure is a rare surviving house from when this section of Second Avenue was one of the most elite addresses in Manhattan.

The house at 110 Second Ave. was constructed as one of four houses built for brothers Ralph, Staats, and Benjamin Mead and designed in the Greek Revival style. Although the only one remaining of the original four houses, 110 Second Ave. retains much of its original details characteristic of a Greek Revival row house. 

The façade is clad in machine-pressed red brick laid in stretcher bond. It has tall parlor-level windows with a cast iron balcony, a denticulated cornice, and a brownstone portico with ionic columns supporting an entablature. In 1839, David H. Robertson, a shipbroker and tradesman, bought the house for his widowed mother, Margaret. Three years later, however, he declared bankruptcy. 

The house was foreclosed, and in 1844, it was auctioned and transferred to Ralph Mead. Mead was the proprietor of Ralph Mead and Co., a wholesale grocery business. He and his second wife, Ann Eliza Van Wyck, lived at 110 Second Ave. (then No. 108) from 1845 to 1857. After that, they leased the house but retained ownership until 1870. It was sold in 1872 to George H. and Cornelia Ellery, who then sold it in 1874 to the Women's Prison Association ... 

In 1992, the Hopper House was renovated and re-opened as a residential alternative to imprisonment for women. 

Meanwhile, with 70 employees and 50 volunteers, WPA continues to operate from its other community sites in New York City, jail-based offices on Rikers Island, and the Taconic and Bedford Hills State Correctional Facilities.