419 West 22nd Street

An 1856 Anglo-Italianate row house on a narrow lot: four stories over a raised basement, a stoop to the parlor floor, and the shallow-arched openings and bracketed detail that distinguish the Anglo-Italianate from the full Italianate brownstones that followed a decade later. The Department of Finance records the building at 4.75 stories, its shorthand for four full floors plus a partial level below.

Four apartments across roughly 4,284 square feet puts the units at a little over a thousand square feet each, which on a sixteen-and-two-thirds-foot frontage means each apartment runs the full depth of the house — light and air front and rear, no interior corridor, and the deep rear yard behind. A house of this configuration typically produces a garden-level residence with direct yard access and floor-throughs above; the record does not identify which apartment is which, and floor plans should be obtained rather than assumed. Listing records confirm that washer-dryers are permitted in the apartments, which in a four-story walk-up with no basement laundry is not a small point.

Buyers should expect condition to vary widely and to matter more than in a larger building. In a four-unit cooperative there are no comparable sales inside the building to anchor a price, and the spread between a renovated floor-through and an unrenovated one is the dominant variable.

There is no elevator, no doorman and no documented staff. Department of Buildings filings over the past decade read as ordinary maintenance of a small landmark house rather than as a capital program: a new gas meter and a boiler with tankless coil in 2014; interior renovation with the construction of a porch in 2016; a pipe scaffold and a heavy-duty sidewalk shed in March 2017 for remedial inspection and repairs; façade repairs at the north elevation filed in November 2017 by a preservation-specialist architect; and an interior renovation with exterior window work in 2020. That is a building that has attended to its envelope in the recent past, which is the right thing to have found.

Because no financial statements for this cooperative are on file with us, we make no representation about reserves, the underlying mortgage, assessments or capital planning. In a four-shareholder building those documents are the transaction.

Nothing is published, and nothing is on file. No offering plan, proprietary lease, house rules or financial statements for 419 West 22nd Street exist in either the Compass Offering Plan Library or The Roebling Research Library, and the cooperative maintains no management-sourced policy record of the kind larger buildings post. That is entirely normal for a four-unit house and it is not a defect. It does mean that every term a buyer needs must be obtained in writing from the managing agent, and none of it should be inferred from the neighbors.

Specifically, all of the following are undocumented and must be asked: the maximum permitted financing and minimum down payment; the post-closing liquidity requirement; whether there is a flip tax and how it is calculated; whether subletting is permitted and on what seasoning, term and fee; whether pied-à-terre use is allowed; whether purchase or ownership by an LLC or other entity is permitted; and what the board package and interview process actually consists of. In a four-apartment cooperative these terms are frequently set informally, and they change with the composition of a board that is, by definition, most of the building.

One item is documented, and it is worth having. A revocable trust took title on a recorded share transfer in 2022, which establishes that trust ownership has been accepted here at least once. That is meaningful for buyers whose estate planning requires it, and it is more than can be said for most small cooperatives — but a single precedent is not a policy, and it should still be confirmed.

Approvals now run on a statutory clock. New York City's 2026 cooperative application law requires a cooperative to acknowledge a completed board application in writing within fifteen days and to render a decision within forty-five days of that acknowledgment. Small self-administered boards are the ones most likely to drift past an informal timeline; the law applies to them regardless of size.

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. Most recent trades (2025) cleared a median $1,055/sf across 1 sale. Median listing discount 3.0% 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 1-00720-0038) 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.

Get the documents before you get attached. No offering plan, proprietary lease, house rules or financials for this building are in circulation. Financing ceiling, post-closing liquidity, flip tax, sublet policy, pied-à-terre rules and entity ownership are all unknown until the managing agent puts them in writing. Ask for all of them in one request, in writing, before you make an offer.

Underwrite the denominator. Four shareholders own one roof, one façade, one boiler and one landmark-regulated envelope. A Landmarks-compliant window or cornice project that would be a rounding error in a hundred-unit building is a materially sized assessment here. Ask for the last three years of financial statements, the reserve balance, and any assessment history — and ask what the board's plan is for the next façade cycle.

The 2017 façade work is a good sign — verify how far it went. A pipe scaffold, a heavy-duty sidewalk shed and a north-elevation repair filed by a preservation architect suggests the envelope was addressed within the past decade. Confirm the scope, the sign-off and what was deferred.

Confirm the conversion year and get the plan if it exists. Listing records say 1977; PLUTO logs 1979. The offering plan settles it and also settles the share allocation, which is how your maintenance is calculated.

Trusts have been permitted once; entities are unknown. If your purchase structure requires a trust or an LLC, raise it before you spend money on diligence rather than after.

Run the qualification math for a small board. Four-shareholder boards apply their own standards and are not bound by market convention on financing or liquidity. Run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator before offering, and assume the requirement is conservative until you are told otherwise.

Assemble the paper first. Because nothing about this building circulates publicly, the seller who arrives with the proprietary lease, current financial statements, the share allocation and a written statement of the flip tax and sublet policy removes the buyer's largest source of hesitation. Sellers who cannot produce those documents lose weeks and, usually, price.

Sell the block and the house, precisely. One 1856 Anglo-Italianate house on its own lot, in the Chelsea Historic District Extension, with roughly thirty-four feet of rear yard. Distinguish it from the paired houses down the street — the single-house structure is a real difference and buyers who have looked at the block will not have been told about it.

Be explicit about the tax position. No J-51, no 421-a, full assessment. There is no benefit to lose and no phase-out to explain, which is a clean answer that many Chelsea conversions cannot give.

Price against condition and floor, not against averages. With five recorded transfers since 2007 there is no internal comparable set. Run the Renovation Cost Calculator against the likely buyer's scope and set the ask from that math, remembering that Landmarks review governs anything visible from the street.

If you're considering 419 West 22nd Street, also evaluate:

• 429 West 22nd Street — the Morgan Pindar pair a few doors west, on one tax lot; the closest peer and the direct structural contrast
• 461 West 22nd Street — the 1854 pair further west on the same block, also in the Extension
• 450 West 23rd Street — same tax block, opposite frontage; the West 23rd Street alternative
• 333 West 22nd Street — row-house cooperative on the same street east of Ninth Avenue
• 360 West 22nd Street (London Towne House) — elevator cooperative on West 22nd; the services alternative
• 445 West 20th Street — historic-district row house one block south, in the original Chelsea Historic District
• 458 West 20th Street — comparable small-house cooperative on West 20th
• 365 West 20th Street (Chelsea Court Tower) — full-service cooperative in the historic district
• 420 West 23rd Street — boutique condominium a block north; the condominium alternative with no board approval
• 468 West 23rd Street — small-building alternative at the western edge of the district