11 East 79th Street
11 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075
Upper East Side
BBL 1014910007 · BIN 1046428
- Year built
- 1928
- Type
- Cooperative
- Landmark
- Designated
Own an apartment here? See what it would sell for.
A Private Pricing Opinion — what your apartment at 11 East 79th Street would likely sell for today, what it costs to sell, and what you’d walk away with — reviewed personally against condition, exposures, renovation quality, and the competition actually on the market.
11 East 79th Street is one of the rarest things in Manhattan: a fourteen-story building with only seven apartments. Completed in 1928 on the most rarefied block of the Upper East Side — East 79th between Fifth and Madison, steps from the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park — it was conceived from the start as a small house of grand, full-floor and duplex residences rather than a conventional apartment building. The arithmetic alone tells the story: at roughly 4,700 square feet per home, these are mansion-scale apartments stacked into a single discreet limestone-and-brick tower.
Designed by Pleasants Pennington and Albert W. Lewis and converted to cooperative ownership in 1944 — among the earlier conversions on the East Side — the building has spent nearly a century as a tightly held, owner-occupied co-op. Its position on the 79th Street axis, the block that runs from the Met to the Frick's orbit, places it squarely in the Gold Coast: a corridor of pre-war cooperatives and surviving Gilded Age mansions where ground-up new construction is essentially impossible and inventory is generational.
For a buyer, the case is scarcity in its purest form — a full-floor or duplex home on a museum-mile side street, in a building so small that an apartment trading here is a genuine event.
Architecture and unit composition
The building is a refined example of the late-1920s East Side apartment house: a masonry shaft in a restrained neo-Renaissance idiom, with a limestone base, brick body, and the disciplined fenestration that lets a tall, narrow building read as dignified rather than imposing. It was built to disappear politely into a block of mansions and pre-war co-ops — the architecture is in service to the apartments behind it.
Those apartments are the reason buyers come. With seven homes across fourteen floors, nearly every residence occupies a full floor or spans two as a duplex, each entered through a private elevator landing. Expect the full pre-war vocabulary of a Candela-era Gold Coast building: gracious gallery entries, separate formal living and dining rooms, high ceilings, wood-burning fireplaces, and the deep service wings that defined apartments of this scale. At roughly 4,700 square feet apiece, these are houses in the sky — proportions that simply cannot be reproduced in modern construction on this block.
Building operations
A seven-unit co-op runs as a private house. The building offers an attended lobby with elevator service and a live-in superintendent, private elevator-landing entry, and basement storage. There is no sprawling amenity package — at this scale, the amenity is the apartment, the address, and the privacy. Carrying costs reflect a small shareholder base sharing the cost of staff, mechanicals, and the reserve for an early-20th-century masonry building; that intimacy is the trade-off buyers at this level accept and prefer.
Local Law 97
- 2024–2029 annual penalty
- $5,842/yr
- 2030–2034 annual penalty
- $29,469/yr
- Per unit / month range
- $70 – $351
Source: NYC LL84 benchmarking and PLUTO · The Roebling Research Library. City record last verified September 2026.
See full Local Law 97 analysis — emissions history, scenarios, methodology →Facade safety — Local Law 11
The latest available filing classified the facade as SWARMP — Safe With A Repair and Maintenance Program: the engineer identified conditions requiring monitoring or repair before the next inspection cycle. The scope, timeline, and how the building funds the work are building-specific — we review the filings and board materials for you.
How to read this, and where it comes from
QEWI = Qualified Exterior Wall Inspector — the licensed engineer the city requires to sign the report (the independent expert, not the managing agent).
Penalties shown are amounts DOB assessed against filings on record across 2005–10 to 2020–25. The FISP dataset does not record whether they were paid, contested or remain open, so treat the figure as history rather than a current balance and confirm the building’s standing with the managing agent.
Source: NYC DOB facade filings (FISP) · The Roebling Research Library. City record last verified September 2026.
Recent sales
Recent transfers at this building, curated by The Roebling Team research desk. Prices are the transfer amounts recorded with the NYC Department of Finance; apartment-level detail is checked against the building’s own file in The Roebling Research Library before publishing.
| Date | Unit | Apartment | Price | PPSF | vs. Ask |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 12, 2025 | 6 | 4 BR · 4.5 BA · 4,000 sf | $10,500,000 | $2,625/sf | -19.2% |
| Jun 24, 2021 | 10 | 4 BR · 3.5 BA | $6,400,000 | -8.5% |
Market read. Most recent trades (2025) cleared a median $2,625/sf across 1 sale.
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-01491-0007) and verified listing data. Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified by The Roebling Team research desk. Not all transactions cross-verify with ACRIS records — sponsor and LLC purchases sometimes record at stipulated values rather than market price; square footage on co-ops is not officially recorded, figures shown are approximate.
What to know if you’re buying
This is a white-glove cooperative on the most discerning block of the East Side, and the board process matches the address — expect a thorough package and a high bar on financials, references, and primary-residence intent. Financing is conservative, in the manner of premier Fifth-and-Madison co-ops; buyers should plan for a substantial cash position rather than a high loan-to-value. Pied-à-terre, LLC, and investor purchases are not the building's profile, and subletting is tightly restricted — a seven-unit house is bought to be lived in. There is real value in being prepared: at this scale, the board cares as much about fit and stability as about price.
The reward for clearing that bar is a mansion-scale home on a museum block, in a building with a near-unbreakable supply constraint — the kind of asset that defines a corridor rather than tracks it.
What to know if you’re selling
The selling story writes itself: a full-floor or duplex residence on East 79th between Fifth and Madison, in a fourteen-story building with seven apartments, steps from the Met and Central Park. Scarcity, scale, and address are the entire pitch — and all three are durable.
Pricing should be benchmarked to the trophy Fifth-and-Madison co-op tier, not to the broader East Side market; the comparison set is the handful of full-floor and duplex homes that trade nearby in any given cycle. With so few apartments, a single sale here can reset the building's pricing for years, so positioning and presentation matter enormously. A board-ready buyer with deep liquidity and a primary-residence story will clear approval most smoothly — worth identifying before going to contract.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 11 East 79th Street, also evaluate these nearby Fifth-and-Madison and East 79th Street cooperatives:
- 21 East 79th Street — pre-war cooperative on the same Gold Coast block
- 50 East 79th Street — East 79th Street co-op nearby
- 66 East 79th Street — pre-war cooperative on the corridor
- 136 East 79th Street — established East 79th Street co-op peer
- 1016 Fifth Avenue — Fifth Avenue cooperative facing the Met
The full playbook — what goes in the package, how boards read your financials, the interview, and the timeline — plus sample cover, reference, and personal letters you can adapt.
How to read the facts on this page. Items attributed to an offering plan describe the building as it was offered at that filing — unit mix, square footage, the amenity program as planned. They are not a statement about how the building operates today. Tax and compliance figures are sourced separately to current City records and carry their own dates. House rules, staffing and fee policy can change by board resolution without any public filing: treat every policy line here as a starting point for diligence and confirm it with the managing agent. Where this page compares one building or neighborhood to another, that is our analysis of the recorded record — it names the measure, the period and the sample it rests on, and it is an observation about medians rather than a prediction about any particular apartment.
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