404 Riverside Drive (The Strathmore)
404 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025
BBL 1018950038 · BIN 1057344
- Year built
- 1908
- Type
- Cooperative
- Units
- 49
- Floors
- 12
- Landmark
- No
- Pets
- Permitted per management records — confirm current terms and any weight or breed limits with the managing agent
- Financing
- 67 percent maximum (33 percent minimum down) per management records
Every recorded sale at this building, 2004–2026
Bedroom-by-bedroom medians, the full transfer record, and how units trade against ask.
- 3BR median
- $1.8M
- Recent range
- $1.6M – $8.2M
- Listing discount
- 4.7%
- Recorded transfers
- 38
Riverside Drive above 110th Street is a different market from the Drive below it. The blocks between Cathedral Parkway and 116th Street were developed as Columbia and its institutional neighbors pulled the city north, and the apartment houses that went up there in the first decade of the twentieth century were built to a scale — ten rooms to a floor-through, ceilings over ten feet, service wings — that the Drive south of 100th Street produced only sporadically. The Strathmore is one of the best of them, and it is the northernmost of the three adjacent-block Riverside Drive cooperatives we cover in this stretch.
Schwartz & Gross designed it in 1908–09, at the front end of a practice that would go on to produce a very large share of the Upper West Side's pre-war apartment stock. The composition is orthodox Beaux-Arts and well preserved: a rusticated limestone base, a dark brick shaft, and a limestone-and-terra-cotta upper section that carries a deep projecting cornice at the roofline. The original plan put two ten-room apartments on each typical floor. What survives inside — high ceilings, plaster moldings, bordered parquet, paneling in the larger lines — is the reason the building trades on architecture rather than on amenity.
The second reason it matters is structural, and it is unusual. 404 Riverside Drive, Inc. was incorporated on January 25, 1967. That is early: most of the Drive converted in the eviction-plan wave of the late 1970s and the non-eviction wave of the early 1980s, which is why so many neighboring buildings still carry sponsor holdings, sponsor-unit flip-tax carve-outs and rent-stabilized legacy tenancies four decades later. The Strathmore does not. Management records show no sponsor, no sponsor-held apartments, and every unit owner-occupied. For a buyer, that removes an entire diligence category.
The third thing worth knowing is the balance sheet. The corporation's underlying mortgage — a $1,000,000 loan placed with a cooperative lender in February 2005 at 5.74 percent, fully amortizing — reached its scheduled maturity on March 1, 2025, and satisfactions were recorded in March and June 2025. No successor underlying mortgage appears in the public record as of this writing. A 49-unit pre-war co-op carrying no institutional debt is a genuinely uncommon position, and it is the single most useful fact a buyer can take into an offer here. It should still be confirmed against the current audited statement at contract, because a new loan can be placed at any time and open records lag.
Architecture and unit composition
Twelve stories, brick and limestone, on an irregular corner lot of roughly 12,168 square feet with about 103,000 square feet of building above it. The Riverside Drive elevation carries the park exposure; the West 113th Street elevation runs east from the corner. The building was planned as a two-apartments-per-floor house and now holds 49 units, so much of the original inventory has been divided — the practical consequence is that the building's unit mix runs from smaller reconfigured apartments through large classic layouts, and floor plans vary meaningfully line to line rather than repeating cleanly.
Ceiling heights, plasterwork and parquet are the building's inherited assets. Buyers should read each apartment on its own terms: in a house where the original floor-through has been split unevenly, a "two-bedroom" on the seventh floor and a "two-bedroom" on the tenth can be different products. Park-facing exposures on the Riverside Drive side are protected by the park itself and cannot be built out.
Building operations
A staffed, union house — the corporation's employees are covered by the SEIU Local 32BJ collective agreement — with an attended lobby, one passenger and one freight elevator, central laundry, storage lockers and bike storage. There is no garage, no gym and no pool; this is a pre-war building run as a pre-war building, and the maintenance reflects that rather than an amenity program.
Capital posture, from the audited statements on file. In June 2017 a windstorm brought down portions of the building's cornice. Repairs ran to roughly $853,000 through the end of 2019, of which about $640,000 had been recovered from the corporation's insurer by that date — a large event handled largely on insurance rather than on assessment, which is the outcome you want to see. The corporation levied a capital assessment of $12.92 per share in 2019 to fund capital work; a separate 2018 assessment was later cancelled in part and refunded to shareholders after insurance recoveries came in. Maintenance rose 3 percent in each of 2019 and 2020. The reserve fund stood at roughly $440,000 at the most recent year-end on file — modest in absolute terms, but read it against a corporation that has since retired its mortgage.
One distinctive revenue line: the building earns recurring location-filming income, which ran into six figures in one of the years on file. It is publicly identified as the exterior used for the fictional 385 Riverside Drive in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and it has appeared in feature films. It is a real, if variable, offset to operating cost, and it is disclosed in the audited statements.
Policy framework
Financing: 67 percent maximum, so a 33 percent minimum down payment. That is the working number for underwriting an offer here.
Flip tax: 2 percent of the gross sale price, paid by the seller. Documented in both the management record and the audited financials.
Post-closing liquidity, debt-to-income and board-package standards: not published. This is a small, long-converted, fully owner-occupied co-op, and boards of that profile typically underwrite conservatively on liquidity even where the stated financing ceiling is moderate. Ask the managing agent for the current purchase requirements before you write an offer.
Pied-à-terre, trust and LLC purchases, guarantors and co-purchase: not published. A house with no sublet activity and full owner occupancy is unlikely to be permissive on non-primary-residence structures, but the board's actual posture has to come from the managing agent rather than from inference.
Subletting: management records show no units sublet. Terms and seasoning requirements are not published — confirm with the managing agent.
Taxes: no building-level abatement remains. The 2002 J-51 ran out after the 2014/15 tax year. Shareholders receive the citywide co-op/condo abatement, which the corporation offsets with an assessment sized to it — a common structure, and one that means the abatement credit on a tax bill does not translate into a reduction in what a shareholder actually pays.
Local Law 97
- 2024–2029 annual penalty
- $0 (under cap)
- 2030–2034 annual penalty
- $0 (under cap)
- Per unit / month range
- —
Source: NYC LL84 benchmarking and PLUTO · The Roebling Research Library. City record last verified September 2026.
See full Local Law 97 analysis — emissions history, scenarios, methodology →Facade safety — Local Law 11
The latest available filing classified the facade as SWARMP — Safe With A Repair and Maintenance Program: the engineer identified conditions requiring monitoring or repair before the next inspection cycle. The scope, timeline, and how the building funds the work are building-specific — we review the filings and board materials for you.
How to read this, and where it comes from
QEWI = Qualified Exterior Wall Inspector — the licensed engineer the city requires to sign the report (the independent expert, not the managing agent).
Penalties shown are amounts DOB assessed against filings on record across 2005–10 to 2020–25. The FISP dataset does not record whether they were paid, contested or remain open, so treat the figure as history rather than a current balance and confirm the building’s standing with the managing agent.
Source: NYC DOB facade filings (FISP) · The Roebling Research Library. City record last verified September 2026.
Recent sales
The Strathmore trades as an architecture-driven pre-war co-op in a university neighborhood, which produces a specific buyer pool: Columbia and Barnard faculty and administrators, medical and academic households, and buyers priced out of the Drive in the 70s, 80s and 90s who want the same room count for less. Pricing here is driven by line, exposure and condition rather than by building average — park-facing apartments in original large layouts carry a premium over reconfigured interior units, and the spread between a renovated apartment and an estate condition apartment in this building is wide.
The two structural facts that a well-prepared seller should lead with are the 1967 conversion with no sponsor overhang and the retired underlying mortgage. Both survive attorney diligence, and neither is visible from a listing sheet. Unit-level transaction history is maintained in The Roebling Research Library and shared with clients during diligence.
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.
| Date | Unit | Apartment | Price | PPSF | vs. Ask |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 3, 2025 | 8A | 3 BR · 2 BA | $1,650,000 | -5.7% | |
| Mar 19, 2025 | 11A | 3 BR · 2 BA | $1,950,000 | -13.3% | |
| Aug 12, 2022 | 11B | 2 BR · 2 BA | $2,650,000 | +6.2% | |
| Jun 15, 2022 | 4C | 1 BR · 1 BA | $1,325,000 | +1.9% | |
| Mar 10, 2022 | 12E | 2 BR · 2 BA · 1,200 sf | $1,700,000 | $1,417/sf | +7.9% |
| Feb 17, 2021 | 9E | 2 BR · 2 BA | $1,050,000 | +7.7% | |
| Nov 2, 2017 | 12N | 4 BR · 3,650 sf | $5,200,000 | $1,425/sf | -29.7% |
| Aug 7, 2017 | 11E | 2 BR | $1,485,000 | -23.8% |
Market read. $/sf is measured on the latest sales with reliable square footage (2022): a median $1,417/sf across 1 sale. The building has traded as recently as 2026. Median listing discount 5.3% from the last ask — a recurring negotiation gap worth pricing into any offer or listing strategy.
The retrade record
Lines that have traded more than once in the public record — the building’s appreciation arc, apartment by apartment.
Other recent transfers
| Date | Unit | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 10, 2009 | 3E | $1,150,000 |
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 1-01895-0038) 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.
Notable residents
Carrie Chapman Catt and Mary Garrett Hay, leaders of the American woman-suffrage movement, were tenants at 404 Riverside Drive in 1920–21 — the year the Nineteenth Amendment took effect. The tenancy is recorded in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation record for the building, which is the primary source for it.
No other residents are documented in the public record in connection with the building.
What to know if you’re buying
Underwrite to 33 percent down. The 67 percent financing ceiling is the binding constraint on most offers here. Run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator before you bid, not after.
Confirm the debt position in the current audit. The 2005 mortgage matured and was satisfied in 2025 and no successor loan is of record — but get the current audited statement and confirm it, along with reserves and any live assessment, before contract.
Read the specific apartment, not the building. The original two-per-floor plan has been subdivided unevenly. Room count, ceiling height and light vary substantially line to line.
The historic district is real and it is the Morningside Heights district. Exterior work — windows, through-wall units, terrace and cornice conditions — runs through LPC. Confirm the designation report your architect is working from is the Morningside Heights one.
Budget for a pre-war envelope. A 1908–09 masonry building with a projecting cornice on an exposed river-facing corner is a facade-cycle building. The 2017 cornice event was handled largely on insurance; the next cycle may not be.
What to know if you’re selling
Lead with the two facts nobody can see. No sponsor, since 1967; and no underlying mortgage of record after the 2025 payoff. Both are attorney-verifiable and both differentiate the building from every neighbor on the Drive that converted in the 1980s.
Price to the line. Park-facing original layouts and reconfigured interior units are separate products. Same-line comparables move a negotiation here; building averages do not.
Be direct about the financing ceiling. A 33 percent down requirement narrows the pool. Marketing that surfaces it early produces fewer, better-qualified offers and shorter board timelines.
Renovation math drives estate sales. Run the Renovation Cost Calculator against your asking strategy before setting a price on an unrenovated apartment.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 404 Riverside Drive, also evaluate:
- 395 Riverside Drive (The Matincote) — Gaetan Ajello, 1924–25; the corner co-op one block south at West 112th, also in the Morningside Heights Historic District
- 390 Riverside Drive — Ajello again, at West 111th; the larger, later, full-service alternative in the same district
- 375 Riverside Drive — Ajello park-front co-op at Cathedral Parkway
- 370 Riverside Drive — the Cathedral Parkway corner co-op on block 1893
- 355 Riverside Drive — park-front pre-war co-op a few blocks south
- 345 Riverside Drive — pre-war Drive co-op at West 106th
- 340 Riverside Drive — the West 106th corner house; the same developer lineage runs through this stretch
- 325 Riverside Drive — pre-war park-front co-op in the 105th Street group
- 320 Riverside Drive — corner pre-war co-op at West 105th
- 300 Riverside Drive — George F. Pelham park-front co-op at West 102nd
The neighborhood
For the full corridor — architecture, schools, transit, and pricing across Riverside Drive — read The Roebling Team Guide to Riverside Drive.
The full playbook — what goes in the package, how boards read your financials, the interview, and the timeline — plus sample cover, reference, and personal letters you can adapt.
How to read the facts on this page. Items attributed to an offering plan describe the building as it was offered at that filing — unit mix, square footage, the amenity program as planned. They are not a statement about how the building operates today. Tax and compliance figures are sourced separately to current City records and carry their own dates. House rules, staffing and fee policy can change by board resolution without any public filing: treat every policy line here as a starting point for diligence and confirm it with the managing agent.
Considering a move at The Strathmore?
Request a private building brief with the relevant comparable sales, current and off-market availability, and an apartment-specific view of value.
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A Private Pricing Opinion — what your apartment at The Strathmore 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.