Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy
We recently had the opportunity to tour 25 Stuyvesant St., a five-story Anglo-Italianate townhouse for sale on one of the best blocks in the East Village — and NYC.
This corridor between Ninth Street and 10th Street features homes dating to the 1860s.
The home, believed to be designed by James Renwick Jr. (the architect behind St. Patrick's Cathedral), has been on the market since the spring.
Nina Munk, the writer and photographer, and her husband, artist Peter Soriano, and their three kids have lived in the townhome they bought and restored in 2013. The couple purchased the property from the estate of Jean Schoonover about a year after she died.
They said it was beautiful and kooky — they loved it right away — but it also desperately needed a total renovation.
Let's take a look inside... starting with this parlor/den...
Peter's gallery is in France, so the couple has decided to move there. The two are also now empty nesters. (Their youngest is starting freshman year in college.)
Nina told us the home is "beautiful, joyful, comfortable — a wonderful combination of a traditional, historic East Village townhouse yet also a comfortable and casual place to live, relax, raise kids, and have great dinner parties."
Why hasn’t the home been snatched up immediately? Speculation runs from the location (despite Nina's assertion that the East Village is the best neighborhood); perhaps people are looking at townhomes in other areas like the Upper East Side or Brooklyn, rising mortgage rates, and uncertainty about the election.
Also, two previous buyers fell through, one at the last minute.
Last week, the price dropped from $7.25 million to $6.75 million.
The family hopes that an artist, author, or playwright — someone who appreciates the East Village artistic community and the historic block — will buy the home they put so much love and attention into restoring.
7 comments:
Well, at least they have a good excuse for selling. Because my first thought was “How could they ever leave such a wonderful place‽ “
This block, just over from St. Marks Church (which was used for the transvestite funeral in "Angels in America") was seized by the movie crew of "The Interpreter," held for over a week, and had the traffic reversed, so all the cars on East 10th Street had to be parked the wrong way. None of the lightning or thunder was real, the filming night of the storm was clear and warm. You can see Keller (Sean Penn) ducking through the cut-away walk behind Abe Lebewohl Triangle, as he races across to save Silvia (Nicole Kidman), who needless to say already knows her life is in danger and climbs out the bathroom window.
Beautiful!
I used to walk the dog for a couple in another of those buildings, and I was awed by the trompe-l'oeil painting in some of the rooms. These homes have had a lot of love over the years—and sex; actually, I thought I heard once that it was this building—25 Stuyvesant—that was a brothel back in the early 20th century. http://www.nysonglines.com/stuyvesant.htm
So there ya have it. A lot of buildings housed brothels in the 19th century; I used to walk the dogs who lived in 101 Mercer Street—I've since found out it's called The Boddy House https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-1820-boddy-house-no-105-mercer.html#google_vignette—and that was also a 19th-century brothel.
With the EV looking the way it does these days it’s no surprise it is still on the market.
Beautiful, amazing place . However, "The family hopes that an artist, author, or playwright — someone who appreciates the East Village artistic community and the historic block — will buy the home..."??? Not many of them can afford $7 million!
@Me: The guys who own the building I used to visit are both artists.
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