32 West 82nd Street

LPC records the style as neo-Renaissance and the materials as brick, stone and ironwork. The building presents as a nine-story block on a 75-foot frontage, with the decorative program concentrated at the base and the crown in the manner Pelham used throughout the district — a stone-trimmed entrance, ironwork at the ground-floor openings, and a banded upper section.

Apartment lines run A through F on most floors, with a penthouse level above. Department of Buildings filings give a clear picture of how the plan has been reworked over the last fifteen years: 4B combined with 4D in 2011, 9C with 9F in 2011, 6B with 6D in 2016, and — the largest single project on the record — a 2019 combination and renovation of penthouse apartments PH.AB, PH.C and 9D into a single apartment, filed at an estimated cost of $827,442 and including structural work, a skylight and a convenience stair. The practical consequence for a buyer is that the building now holds a genuinely mixed inventory: original one- and two-bedroom layouts alongside a handful of large combined apartments at the top.

Filings also record window replacement, new window openings and through-wall air-conditioning sleeves at individual apartments, all under landmark review. Because the building sits inside the Upper West Side / Central Park West Historic District, any change visible from the street — windows, air-conditioning sleeves, storefront-scale alterations at the base — requires LPC approval before DOB will issue a permit. That is a real constraint on renovation scope and a real addition to renovation timelines.

The cooperative employs union staff under the Realty Advisory Board / Local 32BJ apartment building agreement and owns the superintendent's apartment outright, carried as treasury stock. Payroll and benefits ran roughly $164,000 in the most recent audited year on file, consistent with a small resident staff rather than a doorman roster.

Capital posture, from audited financial statements on file:

• Elevator modernization. A capital assessment effective May 1, 2017 was approved to raise a total of $500,000 for the elevator modernization project, with shareholders able to spread payment over sixty months or pay in a lump sum at a 4 percent discount. The assessment generated roughly $90,400 a year while it ran. The modernization itself was substantially executed in 2019, at $188,363 of capitalized cost in that year alone.
• Lobby and building improvements. Roughly $40,000 of lobby improvements and $13,000 of piping replacement in the same year; mailbox replacement, a bicycle-storage-room upgrade and façade work the year before.
• Façade and roof. DOB records a façade repair cycle beginning in 2000 with a sidewalk shed and roughly $102,000 of work, a roof replacement with masonry work in 2005 at roughly $220,000, further shed and façade activity in 2006 and 2012, and a 2012 alteration filed at $776,765.
• Gas. A defective gas riser and branch piping were replaced in 2008; a new combination gas/oil burner, a new high-pressure gas service, meter and reducing station were installed in 2015. The building has therefore already been through the gas-service upgrade that has caught many prewar Manhattan cooperatives unprepared.
• Reserves. Reserve funds stood above $380,000 at the most recent year-end on file, of which $50,000 is restricted under the lender's reserve covenant. Against a 55,000-square-foot prewar building, that is thin but not unusual. The auditors note that the corporation has not commissioned a formal reserve study and that the board has not adopted a specific funding plan for future major repairs — which means future capital work will most likely be funded by assessment or by borrowing, as the elevator project was.

One operating quirk worth understanding: the board has run operating assessments approximately equal to the co-op tax abatement and STAR credits the corporation receives on behalf of qualifying shareholders. In effect the building recaptures the abatement into the operating budget. It is a common and defensible practice, but it means a shareholder's headline abatement benefit does not translate one-for-one into a lower monthly.

Only two policy facts here are documented, and both come from documents on file rather than from any public source:

• Flip tax: 1.375 percent of the purchase price, charged to each non-sponsor unit sale.
• Pets: the house rules provide that no bird or animal may be kept or harbored in the building unless expressly permitted in writing by the corporation, and that such permission is revocable. Dogs must be carried or leashed in all public portions of the building.

The house rules on file also set the terms most buyers discover late: at least 80 percent of the floor area of each room must be covered with rugs, carpeting or equally effective sound-reducing material, excluding kitchens, pantries, bathrooms, closets and foyers; and construction and repair work is permitted only on weekdays, excluding legal holidays, between 8:30 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Window air-conditioning units, awnings and anything projecting from a window require prior approval — which, in a historic district, means LPC as well as the board.

Everything else — the financing ceiling, the post-closing liquidity requirement, the sublet policy and its fee structure, pied-à-terre treatment, and whether trusts or limited liability companies may take title — is unpublished board policy in a building of this size and appears in no public record. Obtain it in writing from the managing agent before you make an offer, not after.

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 (2023): a median $849/sf across 1 sale. The building has traded as recently as 2024. Median listing discount 3.8% 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 1-01195-0048) 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.

Ask about the sponsor position first. A holder of unsold shares at roughly 21 percent of the corporation is the single most important thing on this page. It bears on board control, on the owner-occupancy ratio your lender will test, and on how quickly the building's remaining rent-regulated tenancies unwind. The number in the statements on file is several years old; get the current one.

Underwrite full taxes. There is no abatement and there never was. Real estate taxes are the largest line in the budget by a wide margin. Run the True Monthly Carrying Cost Calculator on the specific apartment rather than working from a maintenance figure alone.

Get the terms of the 2022 refinancing. The underlying debt rose from $4.5 million to roughly $5.75 million in June 2022, more than a year ahead of the old loan's maturity. The rate, the term and the amortization structure are not in ACRIS. A cooperative that refinanced in mid-2022 did so into a materially higher rate environment than the 3.375 percent it had been paying, and the interest line in the current budget will reflect that.

Expect assessments to be the funding mechanism. There is no reserve study and no funded capital plan. The elevator was paid for by a $500,000 assessment; the next major project will most likely be paid for the same way. Ask what is on the board's list and what the engineer's most recent Local Law 11 report requires.

Confirm the unit count and the apartment itself. The tax roll says 47, the corporation's audited statements say 49, listing records say 57, and at least four combinations have been executed since 2011. None of this is sinister — it is what happens to a hundred-year-old building — but it means you should verify the share allocation and the certificate of occupancy for the specific apartment rather than relying on any published count.

Budget the landmark premium into any renovation. Windows, sleeves and anything else visible from West 82nd Street go through LPC before DOB. Build the review time into your schedule and the cost into the Renovation Cost Calculator.

Lead with the capital work that is already done. Elevator modernization, lobby, roof, façade cycles, the gas service replacement — a buyer's advisor is going to ask what is coming, and this building can answer with a list of what is finished. That is worth more in this market than it was five years ago.

Have the policy answers in writing before the first showing. Financing ceiling, liquidity, sublet, pied-à-terre, trusts and LLCs. In a building where none of it is published, the seller who has the managing agent's written answers ready shortens the marketing period materially.

Be straightforward about the sponsor shares and the taxes. Both will surface in diligence. Disclosing them early costs nothing; having them discovered late costs a price reduction.

Position against the park block and against Columbus. This is a Central Park West side-street address without a Central Park West price. The comparable set is the small and mid-size prewar cooperatives between the park and Columbus, not the full-service towers on the avenue.

If you're considering 32 West 82nd Street, also evaluate:

• 41 West 82nd Street — the closest like-for-like prewar cooperative, directly across the street on the same block front
• 71 West 83rd Street — the 1885 Dundonald Flats one block north; a much smaller and much earlier building on a comparable park block
• 15 West 81st Street and 11 West 81st Street — prewar cooperatives one block south, facing the American Museum of Natural History
• The Beresford — the Emery Roth landmark on the avenue at 81st Street; the trophy alternative two blocks away
• 101 West 81st Street — larger prewar cooperative at Columbus Avenue
• 150 West 82nd Street and 182 West 82nd Street — the same street west of Columbus, at a different price point
• 134 West 82nd Street and 139 West 82nd Street — small prewar cooperatives on the block west of Columbus
• 15 West 84th Street — prewar cooperative on a comparable park block to the north
• 101 West 78th Street — prewar cooperative near the museum, south of the block
• 45 West 89th Street — small prewar cooperative on a comparable park block uptown