132 East 19th Street

The building is a seven-story brick-and-stucco house of about thirty feet of frontage, sitting mid-block in a designated streetscape of rowhouses and small apartment houses. LPC records brick as the primary material and stucco as the secondary, which is the correct way to read the elevation: masonry structure with the stucco surface treatment that ties the building to the rest of Sterner's block. Fire escapes are original to the front — platform extensions to the second-floor fire escape were permitted in 2004 — and fireplaces are working, with flue, firebox, smoke-chamber and liner work permitted across 2000, 2006 and 2015.

Layouts started as an E-and-W pairing, east and west lines per floor, with an F line appearing in the current apartment numbering. The building has been consolidating for two decades. Apartment 4E was combined with 4W in 2007 and 2008. Apartment 3E was combined with 2W and 3W in 2013 — a vertical as well as a horizontal combination, which is unusual and produces a genuinely distinctive apartment. Apartments 7E and 7W were combined under a 2024 filing, and 1E and 1W under filings made in late 2025. PLUTO's 19 residential units is therefore a lagging figure; the real count today is lower, and the practical consequence is that the building's apartments are heterogeneous in a way the raw data does not show. Do not assume two apartments per floor, and do not reason about size from the unit count.

Ceilings, room counts and floor plans vary accordingly. A buyer here should look at the specific apartment and its combination history, not at a building average.

Published accounts attach a roster of early-twentieth-century writers, painters and actors to the Block Beautiful. Those attributions run to the street rather than to this address in the sources we can verify, and we do not repeat them as residents of this building.

This is a lightly staffed, self-contained prewar cooperative: one elevator serving seven floors, a laundry room built into the cellar in 2012, and no doorman in the public record. Nineteen shareholders — fewer now — carry the whole cost base.

The capital record over the past quarter-century is unusually legible and unusually active for a building this size. Roof replacement and masonry reconstruction in 2001. A full façade remediation cycle in 2002 under Local Law 33 of 1991, with a 132-foot sidewalk shed and a seventy-foot scaffold. Another façade cycle in 2011, again with shed and scaffold. Lobby renovation in 2015 — brick replacement at the entrance, floor tile, plaster and lighting. A gas boiler replacement with a new hot-water storage tank in 2018. Then, from 2021, two large programmes running at once: a building-wide domestic gas piping upgrade, filed in 2021 and permitted in phases through late 2022, and an exterior restoration — brick replacement, stucco replacement, lintel and sill replacement — filed in October 2021 and still generating sidewalk-shed and pipe-scaffold filings into 2024. Interior wall penetrations in the cellar and in the E and F lines were repaired and restored under a separate 2021 filing.

Read together, that is a decade's worth of deferred and non-deferrable work compressed into a few years, and the financing follows it exactly. The cooperative's underlying debt ran small for a long time: a $210,000 and then a $400,000 cooperative-bank mortgage in the 1990s, a $1.0 million package in March 2004, a $1.2 million consolidation with a commercial bank in 2013 and 2014 alongside a $500,000 line. In September 2022 — in the middle of the gas and façade programmes — the corporation refinanced into a $2.25 million first mortgage and a $500,000 line of credit with a cooperative lender, and that loan was securitized two months later.

For a buyer, this is the most important paragraph on the page. The building has done its work rather than deferring it, which is the good version of this story. It has also roughly doubled its underlying debt to pay for it. Ask for the maturity date and the rate on the $2.25 million, ask whether the $500,000 line is drawn, ask whether an assessment ran alongside the borrowing, and ask what remains on the exterior restoration. None of those answers is in the public record. All of them are in the audited financials and in the managing agent's file.

Ownership form: Cooperative. Apartments are not real property. A purchaser acquires shares in 132 East 19th Street, Inc. together with a proprietary lease for the apartment those shares are allocated to. Transfers record in ACRIS as share transfers under property type SP, single residential cooperative unit — twenty-five such records appear against this lot, alongside the corresponding real property transfer tax returns, running from 2004 to the present and conveying between separate, unrelated parties. This is a functioning share-ownership building, not a rental in a wrapper.

Board approval: Full board package and interview, as in any Manhattan cooperative. The specific package requirements, the interview practice, and the board's turnaround are unpublished.

Everything else is undocumented, and that is the finding. No offering plan, proprietary lease, house rules, alteration agreement or financial statement for this building is on file in The Roebling Research Library or in the Compass Offering Plan Library, and no published source carries a reliable policy stack. That means the following are unknown and must be obtained in writing from the managing agent before an offer, not assumed:

• Financing ceiling and minimum down payment. In a nineteen-share prewar co-op the ceiling is frequently 70 or 75 percent and is occasionally lower. Assume nothing.
• Post-closing liquidity. This is never published anywhere in any building. It is a practice rather than a rule, and in a small co-op it is the single most common reason a qualified buyer is declined. Ask what the board has actually been looking for.
• Sublet policy. Whether subletting is permitted at all, after how many years of ownership, for how long, and at what fee.
• Flip tax or transfer fee. Structure — percentage of price, percentage of gain, per-share, or flat — and who pays it.
• Pied-à-terre, trust, LLC, co-purchase, gifting and guarantors. Small boards have settled views on all of these and publish none of them.
• Pets and in-unit washer/dryer. The building has fireplaces and a cellar laundry room; whether in-unit laundry is permitted is a separate question governed by the alteration agreement.
• Current assessment status. Given the 2021–2024 capital programme and the 2022 refinancing, this is not a formality.

We would rather publish that list than invent answers to it.

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.

Market read. $/sf is measured on the latest sales with reliable square footage (2021): a median $1,750/sf across 1 sale. The building has traded as recently as 2025. Median listing discount 0.0% from the last ask.

Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-00874-0054) 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.

You are buying shares, not real estate. The closing is a share transfer with a proprietary lease, a stock certificate, a UCC-1 filing and a recognition agreement if you are financing. Budget the timeline for board review, and note that New York City Local Law 58 of 2026 now sets acknowledgment and decision deadlines for cooperative board applications.

The financing ceiling is unpublished. Get it first. Before you fall in love, ask the managing agent the maximum permitted financing and the minimum down payment in writing. Then ask what post-closing liquidity the board has been looking for — that number is never in any document, and it decides more applications than the ceiling does. Run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator against the real answer rather than a guess.

Ask about the sublet policy before you underwrite any flexibility. Assume nothing. If your plan involves ever renting the apartment, resolve it in writing before contract.

Read the underlying debt and the capital programme together. The corporation refinanced to $2.25 million plus a $500,000 line in September 2022, in the middle of a building-wide gas piping upgrade and a multi-year landmarked exterior restoration. Ask for the loan maturity and rate, the line's drawn balance, the assessment history, and the remaining scope and budget on the façade work. In a building with fewer than twenty shareholders, all four are per-unit numbers.

Landmark status is a cost and a constraint. Windows, façade, ironwork and any visible exterior change need a Certificate of Appropriateness. That is why the recent restoration replaced brick, stucco, lintels and sills in kind. Factor LPC review into any alteration you are planning, and ask the managing agent whether the building has open LPC or DOB items.

Check the combination history of the specific apartment. Several apartments here are combinations of two or three former units, one of them vertical. That is a genuine differentiator and it also means the apartment's plan may not match anything else in the building.

The flip tax is unknown. Ask, in writing, and ask who pays it. It is a closing-cost line you cannot estimate from anything published.

Lead with the block, accurately. This building is on the Block Beautiful, between Irving Place and Third Avenue — not near it. That is a defensible, verifiable claim and it is the strongest thing you have. Say it plainly and let buyers check it.

Get ahead of the policy vacuum. Nothing about this building's rules is published anywhere. A seller who arrives with a current, written answer from the managing agent on financing, sublet, flip tax, pied-à-terre and pets removes the single largest source of friction in the deal. A seller who does not will lose two weeks to it.

Have the capital story ready and tell it as strength. Gas piping upgraded building-wide. Façade restored under landmark review. Boiler replaced in 2018. Roof done. This is a building that has spent rather than deferred — but the buyer will find the 2022 refinancing, so bring the maturity, the rate and the assessment history to the conversation instead of being asked for them.

Document the combination. If the apartment is a combined line, produce the DOB filings and the sign-offs. Buyers and their attorneys ask, and unpermitted-looking combinations stall closings.

Prepare the buyer for a small board. Nineteen shareholders means a board that reads packages closely and knows every apartment. Brief the buyer's agent on what the board has asked for recently; it shortens the deal by weeks.

If you're considering 132 East 19th Street, also evaluate:

• 112 East 19th Street (Ruggles House) — the loft cooperative on the same tax block, one block west, and outside the historic district; the direct tenure-and-landmark comparison
• 105 East 19th Street — 1920 prewar cooperative on the same street; the conventional apartment-house alternative
• 117 East 18th Street (The Ram Building) — 1930 prewar loft converted to condominium around the corner; the condominium alternative with no board approval
• 157 East 18th Street (The Gramercy Regent) — postwar building converted to cooperative in 1991; the lower-maintenance co-op comparison
• 81 Irving Place — prewar Irving Place cooperative a block west
• 61 Irving Place — mid-century Irving Place cooperative; full-service alternative at lower ceiling heights
• 130 East 18th Street (Gramercy Plaza) — 1962 building converted to cooperative in 1984; the postwar balconied option a block south
• 26 Gramercy Park South (The Irving) — prewar cooperative directly on the park; the park-facing step up
• 34 Gramercy Park East (The Gramercy) — the landmark park-front cooperative; the historic-district comparison at larger scale
• 220 Third Avenue — 1901 building converted to condominium in 2006; the other loft-vintage conversion on this tax block