140 Thompson Street (The West Broadway Arches)

The building is a six-story loft structure of 1885 vintage per city records, covering a 15,322-square-foot through-block lot with roughly 111 feet of frontage. Its 86,018 square feet of building area is overwhelmingly residential — 81,518 square feet — with 4,500 square feet of commercial space at the base. The signature is the arched window openings that give the cooperative its name, carried across a red-brick elevation; interiors retain the loft vocabulary of exposed brick, original timber and oversized arched glass.

The residences are lofts in the true sense: large, open plates rather than compartmentalized apartments, with widths and depths that vary substantially between the West Broadway and Thompson Street halves of the building. Duplex configurations exist, and Department of Buildings filings across the 2000s and 2010s record repeated apartment combinations and at least one penthouse-level addition at the roof — which is the mechanical explanation for why the unit count in the public record has moved between 30, 39 and 40 over twenty-five years. Six floors and a very deep plate also mean that light in a given residence is a function of which frontage it reaches and whether it runs through; that is the single most important thing to establish about any specific unit here, and it cannot be established from a floor plan.

The cooperative runs a lean service model appropriate to its size: a live-in superintendent rather than a doorman staff, an elevator, and private storage in the basement. Utilities are individually metered for apartment electricity per the conversion-era plan; confirm the current arrangement with the managing agent, because the metering arrangement in a 1978 loft conversion is frequently not what a buyer assumes.

The ground-floor commercial space is part of the corporation and part of its economics. The offering plan records it as a restaurant at conversion; Department of Buildings filings show it renovated as an art gallery in the 2010s. Ask for the current lease term, the rent, and the expiry, because in a building of this size a single commercial tenancy is a material share of income.

Ownership form: Cooperative. Apartments transfer as shares in West Broadway Arches, Inc. with an accompanying proprietary lease — ACRIS records these as share transfers, not deeds, and the transaction is a stock purchase rather than a real property purchase.

Board approval: Required, with a purchaser interview. A full board package is required, and the timeline runs materially longer than a condominium closing.

Financing: 75 percent maximum financing — 25 percent minimum down, per management-sourced records. That is a comparatively permissive ceiling by downtown cooperative standards and it widens the buyer pool meaningfully.

Subletting: Permitted after three consecutive years of shareholder residency, on a written one-year sublease, subject to board approval and a subtenant interview, with a monthly sublet fee of 20 percent of monthly maintenance charged to the shareholder. Short-term rentals and Airbnb are prohibited. Per the building's own sublease requirements on file.

Pied-à-terre, co-purchasing and guarantors: All considered on a case-by-case basis. None is a published right; each is a board decision.

Trust and LLC purchases: Not addressed in the published policy set. Cooperatives in this class typically permit trust ownership on conditions and rarely permit entity ownership; do not assume either. Ask the managing agent before you write an offer, not after.

Pets: Normal house pets permitted.

In-unit washer/dryer: Permitted — which in a prewar loft cooperative is not a given and is a real point of differentiation.

Flip tax: No flip tax appears in the building's published fee schedule. The seller's only closing charge to the corporation in that schedule is a flat $800 stock transfer fee plus a $250 move-out fee. Confirm with the managing agent that no percentage-of-price transfer fee exists outside the schedule.

Real estate taxes: No exemption on the tax lot in Department of Finance records for fiscal years 2021 through 2027. The J-51 benefit contemplated at the 1978 conversion is long exhausted.

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. Most recent trades (2026) cleared a median $1,333/sf across 2 sales. Median listing discount 1.5% from the last ask — a recurring negotiation gap worth pricing into any offer or listing strategy.

Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-00516-0007) 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.

The board package and the interview are the transaction. This is a share purchase, not a real property purchase. Assemble the package properly the first time — financial statements, reference letters, employment and bank verification, the full disclosure set — and run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator before offering rather than after.

The financing ceiling is 75 percent, which is generous for the class. Twenty-five percent down is the published minimum. Post-closing liquidity is not published; boards in this class commonly want to see one to two years of maintenance and debt service in reserve after closing, and this board's expectation should be established through the managing agent before you commit to a structure.

Establish which side of the building you are buying. The West Broadway units were converted for studio and accessory living use; the Thompson Street units as conventional residential apartments. Obtain the current certificate of occupancy and confirm the classification for your specific unit, particularly if you intend to alter the layout or use part of the space professionally.

Landmark status is real and it is the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District Extension. Anything visible from the street — windows, storefront, rooftop equipment, façade repair — needs LPC review. Most work here has cleared under Certificates of No Effect, but a Certificate of Appropriateness has been required on this lot for work reaching protected features. Budget the review time into any renovation schedule.

Confirm the unit count and the share allocation from the corporation's own records. The public record carries 30, 38, 39 and 40 depending on the source. Your maintenance is a function of your share allocation, not of the building's headline count, and only the proprietary lease settles it.

Read the commercial lease. A ground-floor tenancy is a meaningful share of income in a building this size. Term, rent and expiry belong in your diligence file.

Pied-à-terre, co-purchase, guarantor and trust structures are all case by case. None is published as a right. If your purchase depends on any of them, get the board's posture in advance through the managing agent.

Lead with the loft and the block, in that order. Ceiling height, arched windows, square footage and the through-block address are what the buyer pool for this building is shopping for. Bedroom counts are not the unit of account here.

The policy stack is a selling point — use it. Seventy-five percent financing, permitted in-unit laundry, permitted pets, and no flip tax in the published fee schedule together make this an unusually accessible SoHo cooperative. Buyers comparing against buildings with 50 percent financing ceilings and 2 percent flip taxes should be shown the difference in writing.

Document the operating record. Four years of flat maintenance before the modest 3 percent increase effective January 2024 is a real fact about stewardship, and it survives attorney diligence. We provide the underlying board communications from The Roebling Research Library to serious buyers' counsel.

Price against the loft co-op set, not the condominium set. The new-development condominiums nearby have different economics, different policies and a different buyer pool. Drawing comparables from them will misprice this apartment in either direction.

Expect a thin same-building comparable record. With a handful of transfers a year, pricing has to be built from exposure, floor, ceiling height, condition and square footage rather than from a building average.

If you're considering 140 Thompson Street, also evaluate:

• 177 Thompson Street — cooperative on the same street; the small prewar co-op alternative at a different scale
• 131 Thompson Street — cooperative directly across the street; same block, same buyer pool
• 211 Thompson Street — South Village cooperative north of Houston; the Village-side alternative
• 57 Thompson Street — SoHo cooperative south of Broome; different district, comparable tenure
• 184 Thompson Street — condominium on the same street; the condominium alternative with a very different policy stack
• 105 Wooster Street — SoHo loft condominium inside the original Cast Iron district; the loft comparison in condominium form
• 139 Wooster Street — SoHo loft condominium; comparable plate, different tenure
• 160 Wooster Street — SoHo loft building; the closest peer on scale and ceiling height
• 30 Crosby Street — loft conversion on the eastern side of the Cast Iron district
• 311 West Broadway — the same corridor further south; different block character
• 195 Prince Street — condominium a block south; the boutique alternative