20 Bond Street

Four bays wide on a 25.67-foot lot, running the full hundred feet to the rear lot line, with roughly 15,980 square feet of residential area over seven floors. That arithmetic is the product: about 2,280 square feet per floor, one apartment per floor, with a single elevator that opens directly into each loft under key control. The east elevation carries lot-line windows and the shadow of a demolished neighbor; the west elevation is brick with segmental-arched and flat-lintel windows, historic painted advertisements and a five-story billboard space, per the designation report. The top floor, per listing records, has four exposures and fifteen windows.

Recorded share transfers identify the apartments simply by floor number — 2, 3, 5, 7 — which is what full-floor loft ownership looks like in the record. There are no line letters because there are no lines.

This is a seven-unit self-contained cooperative with no staffing to speak of, and the operative fact for anyone underwriting it is that seven owners share a landmarked four-bay facade, a cornice, a roof, an elevator and a boiler. The Department of Buildings record shows the ordinary rhythm: boiler and burner replacement with a conversion from No. 4 to No. 2 oil in 2001, an elevator shaft renovation in 2008, a sidewalk shed and pipe scaffold campaign in 2011–12 with facade repairs, water service replacement in 2015, exterior restoration in 2018, and bulkhead and skylight work in 2020. The LPC permit record runs alongside it — cornice and sheet-metal restoration and roofing in 2020, masonry repair in 2021, vault-light protection and further roofing in 2025 — because every piece of exterior work here requires Landmarks approval in addition to a DOB permit.

Two features generate the kind of ancillary income small loft co-ops depend on. Rooftop telecommunications antennas have been permitted at this address repeatedly since 2004, most recently under LPC and DOB approvals in 2021; and the designation report records a five-story billboard space on the west wall. Neither the leases nor the revenue are public. Ask for them, and for the financial statements that book them, before you underwrite the maintenance.

The debt picture is unusually clean. The cooperative's 2019 refinance recorded a $600,000 first mortgage plus a $350,000 line, and there is no J-51 benefit on the lot and never has been. Nothing is phasing out of the tax line, and there is very little leverage to refinance.

Nothing about the policy stack at 20 Bond Street is published, and in a seven-unit cooperative the written rules matter less than how a board of that size actually behaves. Expect a full board package and an interview. Assume the financing ceiling, the post-closing liquidity expectation, the sublet policy, the flip tax and the treatment of pied-à-terre purchases, trusts and LLCs are all board-discretionary and none of them are on the internet. Get the proprietary lease, the by-laws, the current house rules, the last several years of financial statements and the current certificate of occupancy from the managing agent, and read the certificate of occupancy first.

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 (2022): a median $1,229/sf across 1 sale. The building has traded as recently as 2024. Median listing discount 4.9% 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 1-00530-0058) 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.

Confirm the certificate of occupancy before anything else. Listing records describe an A.I.R. live/work cooperative with a permanent certificate of occupancy, and the zoning history supports it. Your attorney should read the actual certificate, and you should ask the managing agent directly how the board treats a purchaser who is not a certified artist. In a NoHo loft this is the diligence item that actually decides whether the apartment works for you.

Do not confuse this with 10 Bond Street. Same block, different lot, different historic district, and a fundamentally different tenure — 10 Bond is a leasehold structure over ground leases; 20 Bond owns its fee. If you are comparing carrying costs between the two, you are comparing two different asset classes.

Seven owners, one landmarked facade. Landmarks jurisdiction over every exterior element, a Local Law 11 cycle that recurs regardless of building size, and one-seventh of the cost. Ask for the reserve balance, any live or contemplated assessment, the most recent facade filing, the roof and boiler ages, and the elevator's modernization history.

Underwrite the ancillary income, don't assume it. Rooftop telecom and the west-wall billboard are documented in the permit and designation record. The leases, their terms and their expirations are not. In a seven-unit building this income can be a material share of the budget, and its loss can be a material assessment.

No abatement, and none coming. There is no J-51 on this lot and never was, despite four neighboring lots on the same block having taken one. The tax line is the tax line.

Name the architecture precisely. Cleverdon & Putzel, 1894–95, for Benedict Klein; Romanesque Revival with Renaissance Revival detail in brick and terra cotta; in the NoHo Historic District Extension, with the LPC's own report calling it largely intact. On a block where every building has a design story, most listings for this one say none of it.

Lead with the fee ownership. Your buyer's attorney will be reading ground leases up and down this block. Yours does not have one. Say so early, in writing, and hand over the 1984 deed.

Assemble the diligence file before you list. Certificate of occupancy, proprietary lease, by-laws, house rules, recent financial statements, reserve position, facade and roof history, and the telecom and billboard leases. In a seven-unit building, buyers' counsel reads all of it, and gaps read as risk.

Position against the block, not the neighborhood. The comparison set is the boutique condominiums up Bond Street and the loft cooperatives on Great Jones and Bleecker. The pitch is a full-floor loft in a protected 1890s building whose corporation owns the land — with the live/work framework disclosed early rather than discovered late.

If you're considering 20 Bond Street, also evaluate:

• 19 Bond Street — 1879–80 Neo-Grec store-and-loft across the street, converted in 1989 to a ten-residence condominium; the nearest peer on vintage and scale
• 10 Bond Street — the same tax block; a leasehold condop over ground leases running to 2102, and the essential contrast in tenure
• 1 Bond Street — the landmarked 1880 Robbins & Appleton cast-iron loft condominium
• 7 Bond Street — landmarked Second Empire cast-iron loft condominium
• 22 Bond Street — six-residence corten-steel boutique condominium directly opposite
• 25 Bond Street — boutique loft-style condominium setting the block's top-end pricing
• 40 Bond Street — Herzog & de Meuron's 2007 condominium; the block's design benchmark
• 41 Bond Street — DDG's bluestone-clad boutique condominium of full-floor homes
• 27 Bleecker Street — 1888 loft on the same tax block, converted in 1985 to an artists' joint living-work cooperative; the closest peer on both conversion framework and cooperative tenure
• 43 Great Jones Street — 1892–93 Romanesque Revival loft co-op of full-floor residences
• 27 Great Jones Street — ten-residence loft condominium formed in 1998 from two nineteenth-century buildings
• 285 Lafayette Street — the Hawley & Hoops chocolate-factory loft condominium; the larger full-floor alternative