31 West 12th Street (The Ardea)

The building rises eleven floors above West 12th Street on an irregular 5,035-square-foot lot, with roughly 44,600 square feet of residential area. It is not a large building by floor area per unit standards of its era; it is a substantial one. The original apartments were laid out one to a floor, seven rooms plus a bath, with two bedrooms, a library, a dining room, a servant's room with its own bath, and a thirty-foot gallery running through the plan. That gallery is the reason Ardea apartments still read as generous even after a century of subdivision and recombination.

Today the building carries 23 residential units in city records, arranged as east and west lines on most floors. The eleventh floor is the exception: the offering plan describes three apartments there, 11E, 11A and 11B, and records that what would have been 11W is the upper half of a duplex with 10W. Combination activity since the conversion means the current count and the plan's schedule will not always agree apartment for apartment; the managing agent's current stock schedule is the authority.

Interiors retain a high proportion of original fabric — marquetry floors, ornamented moldings and cabinetry, substantial wood doors with original hardware, and ceilings around ten feet. Many apartments have been comprehensively renovated with central air. Fireplaces are the detail most often misrepresented in the market: per the offering plan, every apartment except 1E, 11A and 11B has one, but the east-side flues were sealed for poor draw with the sole exception of 11E. If a working fireplace matters to you, get it in writing.

Apartments 1E and 1W carry professional-use rights under the plan, which is why the ground floor of the building has historically supported office and practice tenancies alongside residential ones.

The Ardea is a staffed but not doormanned building — a resident superintendent and a live-in porter per management-sourced records, with a basement laundry room, private storage and bike storage. That is the correct staffing model for 23 units, and it is the reason maintenance here compares favorably to full-service Village co-ops of similar price per room.

The building's obligations are the ones that come with a landmarked 1895 masonry elevation: Local Law 11 facade cycles, brownstone and ironwork repair, and Landmarks review for anything visible from the street. DOB filings show repeated facade restoration and sidewalk-shed work across the 2010s, which is what a building of this age and designation should look like in the record. Any buyer should ask for the current facade cycle status, the reserve position, and whether an assessment is live or contemplated.

Ownership form: Cooperative. Purchasers buy shares in 31 Operating Corp. and take a proprietary lease. A full board package and interview apply.

Subletting: The proprietary lease on file restricts subletting on the second through eleventh floors without the consent of the directors or of lessees, and permits the board to attach reasonable conditions to any consent. It carries a separate vacation-sublet provision requiring 30 days' notice to the board and barring a subsequent vacation sublet within twelve months of the start of the preceding one, and it treats professional-purpose sublets differently, permitting terms longer than two years and partial sublets. These are the 1977 lease terms; boards amend sublet policy far more often than they amend leases. Treat the current policy as unpublished and confirm it with the managing agent.

Financing ceiling and post-closing liquidity: Not published. Prewar Village co-ops of this size typically cap financing well below 80 percent and expect meaningful post-closing liquidity, often expressed as a multiple of annual maintenance and debt service, but the specific figures at The Ardea are set by board policy and are not in any public record. Ask for them before you write an offer, and run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator against the actual numbers rather than an assumption.

Flip tax: Not documented in public records or in the plan on file. Confirm existence, rate and payer with the managing agent before pricing a sale.

Pied-à-terre, trusts and LLCs: Not documented. The 1977 proprietary lease limits occupancy to the lessee and immediate family and caps guest stays at one month absent written consent, which is standard restrictive prewar language and is the starting point for how a board here is likely to treat non-primary-residence and entity purchasers. Whether the current board entertains pied-à-terre use, purchases in trust, guarantors or co-purchasers is a board-policy question with no published answer.

Pets: Permitted per management-sourced records; confirm weight and count limits in the current house rules.

Real estate taxes: No abatement beyond the standard Class 2 co-op/condo abatement. The building's J-51 benefit from the 1981 alteration expired in 1992.

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 $1,793/sf across 1 sale. The building has traded as recently as 2025. 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 1-00576-0056) 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 Ardea's most documented moment came in May 1921, when Marie Curie stayed in the building as the guest of a resident, the magazine editor Marie Mattingly Meloney, who had organized the American fund drive that purchased a gram of radium for Curie's research. Contemporary press, including the New York Tribune, reported Curie's arrival and described the sidewalk outside the building banked with flowers; President Harding presented the radium later that month. Charles Richard Crane, the American Minister to China, was also a resident of the building. Historical records document these associations; the building does not market them.

Establish which half of the building you are in. The 1895 original (the West line, No. 33) and the 1900 extension (the East line, No. 31) have different plans, different door treatments and different apartment proportions. This is the single most useful structural fact about the building and it does not appear in any listing.

Do not assume the fireplace works. Per the offering plan, east-side flues were sealed for poor draw except at 11E. Verify with the superintendent and the managing agent, and price the difference honestly.

The conversion year in the market record is wrong. Brokerage records widely say 1971. The offering plan on file is dated May 1, 1977, with a March 1976 contract of sale. This matters for anyone reconstructing the building's capital history.

Landmarks governs the exterior. Windows, ironwork and any street-visible alteration require a Certificate of Appropriateness. Budget for the process and the timeline, not just the work.

Ask for the policy stack in writing. Financing ceiling, post-closing liquidity, flip tax, sublet terms and the board's posture on trusts, LLCs and pied-à-terre use are none of them published for this building. Get them from the managing agent before you commit to a price.

Underwrite full taxes. The J-51 benefit is long gone. The only abatement in play is the standard co-op/condo abatement for primary residents.

Lead with the plan, not the address. Ten-foot ceilings, marquetry floors and a thirty-foot gallery are the product. Buyers comparing against Fifth Avenue full-service co-ops will find those buildings smaller room-for-room and considerably more expensive to carry.

Document the renovation. In a building where original fabric is the value, buyers pay a real premium for work that was done well and permitted properly. Assemble the DOB records and the alteration approvals up front.

Be straight about staffing. There is no doorman. The buyer pool that wants a doorman will not buy here regardless of price, and the buyer pool that wants a house-scale Village co-op treats the absence as a feature and a lower maintenance line.

Price by line and by half. With 23 apartments split across an 1895 building and a 1900 addition, comparable selection inside the building is more informative than any building-wide average.

If you're considering The Ardea, also evaluate:

• 15 West 12th Street — same block, same corridor; the immediate like-for-like on the Fifth-to-Sixth blockfront
• 37 West 12th Street — a few doors west on the same tax block; comparable prewar Village co-op economics
• 49 West 12th Street — the postwar alternative inside the Greenwich Village Historic District boundary
• 59 West 12th Street — same street, different tenure and vintage; useful for pricing the prewar premium
• 30 West 13th Street — one block north on the same tax block; similar scale and staffing model
• 122 West 12th Street — west of Sixth Avenue; the same buyer at a different price per room
• 125 West 12th Street — prewar Village co-op with a comparable service level
• 24 Fifth Avenue — the full-service lower Fifth Avenue alternative; more staff, higher carry, smaller rooms
• 25 Fifth Avenue — the doormanned lower Fifth co-op one block east; the direct trade-off against The Ardea's house-scale model