225 East 74th Street

Six storeys of brick across a 200-foot frontage, with a symmetrical Art Deco composition and a recessed entrance portico near the centre of the elevation. Listing records describe the entrance, lobby detailing and terrazzo floors as original. There is no setback and no tower; the building is a single unbroken slab addressed 225 through 239, which is why city records carry a house-number range rather than a single number.

The plan is wide and shallow — a 200-foot front against roughly 87 feet of building depth — so most apartments face either the street or the rear yard rather than sitting in a deep interior core. Fourteen lettered lines run from A at the western end to P at the eastern. The offering plan's Schedule A shows a mix running from studios and three-room apartments through five-room, two-bath layouts; there was no penthouse and no duplex in the original offering. Ceiling heights and window proportions are the 1938 standard rather than the taller 1920s prewar section, and buyers coming from a 1920s co-op should walk a unit before assuming otherwise.

Combinations have reshaped the top of the inventory. The Department of Buildings record carries a three-apartment combination on the sixth floor completed in 2002, second-floor combinations in 2012 and 2016, and structural reinforcement for a reconfigured first-floor apartment in 2014. ACRIS carries share transfers under combined designations. The 84 in PLUTO is the count as offered in 1981; it is not the count of front doors today.

The corporation runs a staffed building with two passenger elevators, a live-in superintendent, central laundry, private storage and a shared courtyard, per listing records. Door coverage is described in current listing records as full-time; it does not appear in the 1981 conversion budget, which provided for a superintendent and two porters under a Local 32B-32J contract, so it is an addition of the intervening decades. Confirm the current schedule rather than assuming round-the-clock coverage.

The capital record is long and mostly exterior. The Department of Buildings file carries a full façade repair with a 200-foot sidewalk bridge in 2003; a second, larger façade programme filed in 2011 covering roof parapet replacement, steel lintel replacement, brick replacement and window sill repair, with a 213-foot shed; a 2014 boiler job that replaced the oil burner and tank and changed the fuel grade from No. 6 to No. 2; a 2018 burner retrofit that added a new low-pressure gas service, converting the plant to combination gas-and-oil firing; and a further façade repair and roof base-flashing job filed in 2018. On the Department of Buildings' façade-compliance register, the most recently filed report — Cycle 9, filed September 2022 — came in SWARMP, safe with a repair and maintenance programme, as did Cycle 8 in 2016 and Cycle 6 in 2007. Cycle 7, in 2012, filed SAFE. A building that files SWARMP repeatedly is not in distress, but it is a building with continuing exterior obligations, and the next cycle's report and any associated assessment belong in your diligence file.

The underlying mortgage has been refinanced repeatedly and is small in absolute terms: ACRIS records a $1.2 million first mortgage at the 1982 conversion, $1.75 million later that month, $1.25 million in 1988, a $2.2 million facility in 2007, $1.7 million in 2016, and an assignment of leases and rents with a related agreement at $1,700,000 recorded in June 2026 with a new lender. Against 84 apartments that is a light debt load by Manhattan cooperative standards. Ask the managing agent for the current balance, rate and maturity, and for the most recent audited statements.

The Department of Finance's historical J-51 file shows three separate grants on this tax lot. The first, initiated in 1986 against a certified alteration cost of $39,800, ran to exhaustion in fiscal 1997. The second, initiated in 1991 against a certified cost of $212,500, ran to exhaustion in fiscal 2002. The third, initiated in 2010 against a certified cost of $77,593, is the one that still shows in the record: the Department of Finance's abatement file carries it as an active certificate with a benefit window running July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2030, but the applied-abatement figures tell a different story. The last year in which a dollar amount was actually applied against the tax bill was fiscal 2021, at $5,172.92 — a partial final year consistent with the pool having been spent. No applied amount appears for fiscal 2022 or later, and there is no J-51 line on the FY2027 assessment roll.

The practical reading: the abatement is exhausted even though the certificate has not formally expired. Underwrite full taxes. The only exemptions the FY2027 roll carries on this lot are individual shareholder benefits — senior citizen and veterans exemptions belonging to particular owners — which do not transfer with an apartment. The building does carry the citywide Class 2 co-op and condominium tax abatement, applied at the corporation level and passed through to shareholders who qualify by primary residence; that benefit follows the shareholder, not the apartment, and a buyer who will not occupy the unit as a primary residence should not underwrite it.

Ownership form: Cooperative. A buyer purchases shares in 225 East 74th Apartments Corp. and takes an assignment of the proprietary lease. Closing runs through a full board package and an interview, and the board has broad discretion, limited by federal, state and city law and its own authority.

Financing, transfer fees and use policies: The 1981 plan contains no flip-tax provision or maximum-financing clause. Management’s September 30, 2026 schedule lists separate buyer and seller flip-tax entries of 1% of purchase price; confirm their applicability before assigning a payer or adding them. The shareholder’s conditional sublet fee is 30% of annual maintenance in year one, 40% in year two and 50% in years three and four, if permitted. A fee schedule does not itself grant subletting permission. Financing, liquidity, term limits, pied-à-terre and entity rules remain unestablished here; obtain the current package and have counsel reconcile it with the plan, by-laws and valid amendments.

What the plan does establish: shares are allocated per apartment (34,050 in total), the superintendent's basement apartment is corporation-owned and not part of the offering, and apartments are separately metered for electricity and gas.

Pets: Not documented in any source we treat as reliable. Confirm with the managing agent.

Recent sales

Recent transfers at this building, from The Roebling Research Library. 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 to date) cleared a median $957/sf (floor-adjusted) across 1 sale. Floor-adjusted means each sale is restated to a constant mix of floors, so the figure can differ from the plain median of the sales listed above. Median listing discount 2.3% 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 1-01429-0013). Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified in The Roebling Research Library. 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.

Get the policy stack in writing before you bid. The offering plan on file settles the building's structure but not its rules. Financing ceiling, post-closing liquidity requirement, flip tax, sublet seasoning and cap, pied-à-terre and trust or LLC purchase — all of it comes from the managing agent, and all of it can decide whether your deal is possible. Run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator once you have the real numbers.

Underwrite full taxes. The 2010 J-51 grant is spent. The certificate runs on paper to 2030, but no abatement dollars have been applied since fiscal 2021. Anyone modelling a J-51 benefit here is modelling a benefit that no longer exists. The co-op abatement is separate and depends on the buyer's own primary-residence eligibility.

Read the façade file, not just the report status. Cycles 6, 8 and 9 filed SWARMP. Ask for the engineer's current report, the scope and cost of the remaining programme, and whether an assessment is contemplated.

Confirm what the unit count means for your line. PLUTO's 84 is the 1981 offered count. Combinations have reduced it. Ask which apartments on your floor have been combined, and what that did to the line's light and layout.

Verify the door coverage. Listing records say full-time; the conversion budget provided for a super and two porters. Both can be true across forty-four years, but you should know which one describes the building you are buying into today.

Lead with the frontage and the lobby. A 200-foot Art Deco elevation and an original entrance sequence are the things no competing Lenox Hill building on this price tier can match. Photograph them.

Present the tax posture up front. There is no building-level J-51 benefit left, and a sophisticated buyer will find that in diligence anyway. Pairing the full tax number, with the co-op abatement shown separately for buyers who will qualify, with a True Monthly Carrying Cost analysis produces better outcomes than letting it surface late.

Have the building's paperwork ready. The admissions package, the current sublet policy, the fee schedule and the most recent audited statements are the documents that stall deals here. Assemble them before you list.

Price by condition, not by line average. The renovation spread in this building is unusually wide. Comparable selection matters more here than in a building that converted into a cleared inventory.

If you're considering 225 East 74th Street, also evaluate:

• 207 East 74th Street — 1963 cooperative on the same blockfront; the post-war alternative at larger scale
• 201 East 74th Street — 2025 condominium at the Third Avenue corner; the new-construction alternative on the same block
• 200 East 74th Street — large post-war cooperative directly opposite; a very different economic structure
• 255 East 74th Street — 2008 condominium; the deeded-ownership alternative nearby on East 74th Street
• 168 East 74th Street — 1926 building converted to cooperative in 1953; the older prewar co-op on East 74th Street
• 112 East 74th Street — 1917 cooperative; the boutique prewar alternative
• 157 East 74th Street — small 1980s condominium; the low-density condo alternative
• 225 East 73rd Street and 235 East 73rd Street — the Eastgate group one block south; the closest comparison by vintage, scale and price tier
• 200 East 75th Street — the adjacent-block new-construction condominium alternative