251 West 89th Street (The Admaston)
251 West 89th Street, New York, NY 10024
BBL 1012377501 · BIN 1033313
- Year built
- 1911
- Type
- Condominium
- Units
- 72
- Floors
- 12
- Landmark
- No
- Financing
- No maximum-financing cap is published. The sponsor offered financing to non-tenant purchasers at conversion and expressly did not offer it to tenants
The Admaston is the better half of a two-building 1910 development that was, at the time, the most consequential land trade on the Upper West Side. Dr. Thomas W. Evans — the American dentist who made a fortune in Paris attending Napoleon III — had bought the entire block from Broadway to West End Avenue between 89th and 90th Streets in 1873 and then died in 1897 with it still vacant. When his heirs finally sold in 1909, the Real Estate Record & Guide called the Evans Block "the most valuable unimproved parcel held in single ownership anywhere on the west side." Robert E. Dowling bought it and, six months later, sold the two diagonally opposed corners — Broadway at 89th, and West End at 90th — to George F. Johnson, Jr. and Leopold Kahn, who commissioned George & Edward Blum to design an apartment house on each.
The Broadway corner got the larger building. The Admaston rose twelve stories at an estimated construction cost of $1 million, and the Record & Guide's February 1911 notice describes what the Blums were actually doing: "It will have suites for sixty families and have large inner and outer courts." Sixty apartments in a twelve-story building on a 15,105-square-foot lot is an enormous per-unit footprint, and the apartments ran five to eight rooms with rents from $1,000 to $2,200 a year. The renting guides of the period listed the selling points — shower rooms separate from the family bathrooms, custom electric fixtures in Roman gold finish, cut-glass door knobs "sanitary because they are easily kept clean." The building was designed for households with live-in staff, and the early tenant roll bears that out: Metropolitan Opera singers, Broadway performers, and Wall Street brokerage partners, most of them with at least one servant.
What survives is the architecture. The Blums were the most idiosyncratic ornamentalists working in New York apartment design in the 1910s, and the Admaston carries their vocabulary in full — the granite base and off-white glazed brick described in the offering plan's own building report, the terra-cotta banding, the inventive ironwork, and inside, the twin Carrara marble staircases that wind the full height of the building. The lobby was modernized in 1970 — terrazzo replaced with marble tile, a canvas canopy added at the entrance — and otherwise the structure is substantially as built.
The ownership history is the part the public record gets wrong. Secondary accounts date the conversion to 1960, which is not possible: New York's condominium statute did not exist until 1964, and the offering plan on file settles it. Aaron Ziegelman and William K. Langfan bought the building on February 1, 1985 and offered a non-eviction condominium plan covering 72 residential units and one commercial unit, with the first year of condominium operation projected to begin January 1, 1986. Every one of the 72 residential apartments was rent-controlled or rent-stabilized at the time of the plan. That is the single most useful fact about the building's transactional character: the Admaston came to market as a tenant-occupied conversion rather than a vacant-and-renovated one, and the unit inventory that has traded over the four decades since reflects apartment-by-apartment renovation on wildly different timelines rather than a uniform developer-finished product.
For a buyer, that means the Admaston is a building where condition variance between apartments is unusually wide — pre-war layouts of genuine size, in a mid-block-quality building on a Broadway corner, but with kitchens and baths whose vintage ranges across forty years. Pricing follows condition and line more than it follows the building average.
Architecture and unit composition
The building occupies a 150-foot Broadway frontage on an approximately 15,105-square-foot lot and carries about 121,500 square feet of building area — roughly 1,690 gross square feet per residential unit, which is an unusual ratio in a 72-unit pre-war condominium and is the structural reason apartments here read larger than their unit count suggests. Sale records from the building over the past two decades include apartments in the 1,200-square-foot range and apartments well over 2,000 square feet, with the largest configurations concentrated in the corner and court-facing lines.
The Blums organized the plan around large inner and outer courts, which is what produces light and cross-ventilation on the interior lines of a building this deep. The offering plan's building description records the exterior as granite and glazed brick with decorative stone trim, red common brick at the courts and rear elevations, wood double-hung windows in 6-over-1 and 8-over-1 patterns depending on elevation, a front fire escape, and a mineral-surfaced roll roof. Because the building is not landmarked, window replacement and façade work do not require Landmarks review — a real cost and timeline advantage relative to the West End Avenue and Riverside Drive co-op stock a few blocks west, most of which sits inside designated districts.
Vertical circulation is the building's one pre-war constraint. The plan describes one automatic self-service passenger elevator and one manually controlled service elevator serving twelve stories. Confirm the current configuration and any elevator modernization history with the managing agent.
Building operations
The Admaston runs as a staffed pre-war condominium with a live-in superintendent, a resident staff, and a central laundry. Payroll is by a wide margin the largest line in the budget — the approved 2024 operating budget on file runs a little under $2.0 million, and payroll and related costs account for roughly two-thirds of it. That is a normal shape for a staffed twelve-story building of this size, but it is worth understanding before underwriting: common charges here fund people more than they fund amenities, because there are effectively no amenities beyond the laundry.
The more useful signal in the budget is what sits below the operating line. The 2024 budget carries a capital-improvement program of roughly $700,000 for the year against roughly $420,000 of non-operating income — a building spending materially on capital work and drawing on reserves or assessment to do it, and running a projected cash deficit after capital spending. The prior two years show the same posture, with capital spending above $1.0 million in one of them. This is not a distress signal; it reads as a condominium working through a deferred-maintenance and compliance cycle on a 1911 structure. It is, however, the first question to ask: what the current capital plan covers, whether an assessment is live, where reserves stand, and what the Local Law 11 façade cycle and Local Law 97 emissions position look like for a building of this age and fuel profile.
The commercial unit carries 3.82 percent of common interest. Retail income and the commercial unit's cost allocation both flow through the budget, and the residential/commercial split is stated explicitly in it — a cleaner arrangement than the informal allocations found in many pre-war conversions.
Recent sales
The Admaston trades as a large-apartment pre-war condominium rather than as a full-service luxury building, and that is the right frame for pricing it. There is no doorman-and-amenity package to underwrite; what a buyer is paying for is square footage, ceiling height, Blum-brothers architecture, a Broadway-corner location one block from the 86th Street express station, and — decisively — condominium ownership in a corridor where almost everything of comparable age is a co-op.
Because the building converted with a fully tenanted rent-regulated roll, renovation vintage drives price dispersion more than floor or exposure does. Two apartments on the same line can be a generation apart in condition. Per-square-foot comparisons across the building are correspondingly noisy; same-line, similar-condition comparables are the only anchor worth negotiating against. Buyers should also underwrite the carrying cost honestly — a staffed building with a heavy payroll line and an active capital program is not a low-common-charge proposition, and the current tax bill on the specific unit belongs in the analysis alongside it.
Unit-level transaction history is maintained in The Roebling Research Library and shared with clients during diligence.
The retrade record
Lines that have traded more than once in the public record — the building’s appreciation arc, apartment by apartment.
Recent closings at this building, sourced from NYC Department of Finance records. Apartment-level detail (line, condition, asking-price context) verified upon consultation request.
| Date | Unit | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 26, 2026 | 1C | $1,450,000 |
| Jan 12, 2026 | 4D | $2,980,000 |
| Oct 1, 2025 | 6F | $2,660,018 |
| Mar 20, 2025 | 2A | $1,775,000 |
| Aug 15, 2024 | 5A | $2,350,000 |
| Aug 13, 2024 | 7A | $2,450,000 |
Full closing history with price-per-square-foot over time, the complete retrade record, and every line that has traded.
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-01237-7501) 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.
What to know if you’re buying
You are buying condominium liquidity in a co-op corridor. Between 86th and 96th Streets west of Broadway, the pre-war stock is overwhelmingly cooperative. A pre-war condominium of this size and quality is a structurally scarce product, and it prices accordingly on the way out as well as on the way in.
Underwrite the capital plan, not the common charge. The budget on file shows sustained capital spending funded partly from non-operating income. Ask for the current capital plan, the reserve balance, the assessment history, and the Local Law 11 and Local Law 97 status before you price.
Condition variance is the whole game. A tenanted 1985 conversion produces a building of forty-year-old renovations sitting next to two-year-old ones. Price the apartment, not the address.
Not landmarked is worth money. Window replacement, façade repairs, and storefront work here do not go through Landmarks. That is a genuine cost and schedule advantage over the designated blocks nearby.
Elevator capacity is a pre-war reality. One passenger elevator across twelve floors, as described in the plan. Confirm the current configuration and modernization history.
What to know if you’re selling
Lead with the architecture and the ownership form. George & Edward Blum, 1911, twelve stories on the Broadway corner, condominium — that combination is rare enough to be the headline.
Lead with the room count. The building was designed for sixty families of five to eight rooms. Even after subdivision, the apartments are large by corridor standards. Square footage and room count sell this building better than amenity language it does not have.
Get ahead of the capital question. Sophisticated buyers and their attorneys will read the budget. Have the current capital plan, reserve position, and assessment status in hand before you list; ambiguity here costs more in negotiation than disclosure does.
Price against the right set. The comparables are the pre-war condominiums and the largest pre-war co-op apartments between 86th and 96th, not the post-war full-service condominiums on Broadway.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering The Admaston, also evaluate:
- 250 West 89th Street — the full-service condop directly across the street; 1986 new construction, a completely different product at the same intersection
- 267 West 89th Street — 1910 pre-war cooperative on the same block, in the brown-brick-and-limestone register
- 317 West 89th Street — 1914 pre-war building converted to condominium; the closest ownership-form comparable on the street
- 320 West 89th Street — George F. Pelham's 1921–22 cooperative, the larger pre-war co-op alternative on the block
- 215 West 88th Street — 2008 condominium conversion of a 1915 building; a direct pre-war-condominium peer one block south
- 255 West 90th Street — Neville & Bagge's 1909 cooperative, converted from rental in 1981
- 2460 Broadway — Schwartz & Gross, 1917; the Broadway-corner pre-war co-op comparable
- 2480 Broadway — Rosario Candela's 1922 Broadway cooperative, at the top of the corridor's pre-war tier
- 670 West End Avenue — George & Edward Blum, 1926; the architects' mature West Side work, in cooperative form
- 760 West End Avenue — another 1926 Blum building, converted from rental in 1982
- 241 West 108th Street — a 1911 Blum cooperative of the same year as the Admaston, uptown and at smaller scale
The neighborhood
For the full corridor — architecture, schools, transit, and pricing across Upper West Side — read The Roebling Team Guide to Upper West Side.
Considering a move at The Admaston?
Request a private building brief with the relevant comparable sales, current and off-market availability, and an apartment-specific view of value.
Own an apartment here? See what it would sell for.
A Private Pricing Opinion — what your apartment at The Admaston 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.