49 East 96th Street

The lot is 100 feet wide and about 102 feet deep, mid-block, with roughly 141,000 square feet of building on it — a substantial mass for an interior site. The Art Deco vocabulary is restrained rather than ornamental: the money is spent at the base, in the limestone surround and the circular window above the entrance, and the shaft above is plain brick with disciplined window openings. Some apartments carry terraces. Through-wall air conditioning was retrofitted across the building in the 2000s under a series of alteration filings, which is why the elevation reads with protruding units rather than with the original clean face.

Apartment composition runs from studios and one-bedrooms through large prewar classic layouts, and the building's most interesting inventory is the combinations. DOB filings on file document a 12th-floor combination, a duplex joining apartments on the 17th and 18th floors, a second-floor combination, and a 15th-to-16th-floor combination — high-floor lines here have been assembled into homes considerably larger than the original plan contemplated. High-floor apartments carry northern, southern, and eastern exposures with open views down toward Midtown and east toward the Triborough Bridge. Because the building is mid-block, west-facing rooms look across low neighbors rather than into an avenue wall.

Ceiling heights, plaster detail, and layout logic are what buyers come to a 1930 building for, and they are present. What is absent is central air, a garage, and the amenity package a comparable postwar building would carry — which is the trade the price reflects.

The building runs as a full-service prewar cooperative: 24-hour doorman, a live-in superintendent, a fitness center, a central laundry room, bike storage, and private basement storage available for a fee. A roof deck was added around 2020 under a filing that also replaced the roof and renovated the bulkhead, which is a meaningful upgrade to a building that had none of that a decade earlier. There is no garage.

The capital record is legible from public filings. Facade and Local Law 11 cycles show up in 2003, 2006, 2011 (with a full parapet replacement), and 2013. In 2018 the cooperative filed a package covering sill and lintel replacement, sectional roof replacement, and cutting and pointing — a substantial envelope program rather than a patch. In 2013 the cooperative filed to convert the boiler to gas service with a new meter and booster, ahead of the heavy-oil deadline. A 2020 roof and roof-deck filing is the latest envelope item; the filings do not confirm completion or current condition.

On the financing side, ACRIS shows the cooperative's underlying mortgage consolidated in November 2013 to roughly $4.5 million with an institutional lender, and no subsequent underlying financing has been recorded against the lot. The recorded mortgage's age does not establish the current balance, maturity or reserve position; a buyer's attorney should obtain the current debt schedule before contract. The building includes a ground-floor restaurant and roughly 4,000 square feet of commercial space. Confirm the cooperative's ownership interests, current lease income and budget contribution; commercial income is not permanent.

Because no offering plan and no audited financial statements for this building are on file in The Roebling Research Library, the reserve position, assessment history, and current underlying debt should all be established through the managing agent and the co-op questionnaire rather than assumed.

Ownership form: Cooperative. You are buying shares in 49 E. 96 Realty Corp. and a proprietary lease, not real property. Purchases require board approval, and a board package and interview are part of every transaction here.

Financing: 60 percent maximum, 40 percent minimum down, per management-sourced records. Treat this as a hard gate rather than a guideline.

Flip tax: 2 percent of the gross sale price, recorded as buyer-paid. Verify the allocation in writing before contract.

Pied-à-terre: Not permitted per management-sourced records. This building is for primary occupancy.

Short-term rental: Prohibited.

Guarantors: Permitted per management-sourced records. Co-purchase, trust, and LLC ownership are not addressed in management-sourced records and must be confirmed with the managing agent — assume nothing.

Subletting: Not documented in management-sourced records. Establish the seasoning period, the maximum sublet term, and the sublet fee before you buy, particularly if your holding period is uncertain.

Post-closing liquidity: Not documented. The board's expectation should be established through your attorney or the managing agent before the package is assembled, not discovered at the interview.

Transaction fees documented in management-sourced records: $400 application processing fee, $75 per applicant for credit checks, a $1,000 non-refundable move-in fee plus a $1,000 refundable move-in deposit, and a $1,000 refundable move-out deposit.

Recent sales

Recent transfers at this building, from The Roebling Research Library. 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 (2026 to date) cleared a median $806/sf (floor-adjusted) across 1 sale. Floor-adjusted means each sale is restated to a constant mix of floors, so the figure can differ from the plain median of the sales listed above. Median listing discount 2.6% 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 1-01602-0020). Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified in The Roebling Research Library. 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.

Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, lived at 49 East 96th Street during his tenure as director from 1929 to 1943 — the years in which he mounted Cubism and Abstract Art and acquired the Picasso holdings that defined the museum's collection. His association with the building was documented again in 2026, when the family apartment came to market for the first time and was covered in the New York real-estate press.

Solve the flip tax before anything else. A 2 percent buyer-paid transfer fee is the most consequential term on this page and the one most likely to be mis-stated in a listing. Get the allocation in writing from the managing agent, and run the Buyer Closing Cost Calculator with it included.

Bring 40 percent. The 60 percent financing ceiling is not negotiable in the way a board's liquidity preference sometimes is. Run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator at the correct loan-to-value before you write an offer.

This is a primary-residence building. Pied-à-terre use is not permitted per management-sourced records. If your plan is a second home, no amount of board packaging will change that.

Ask for the documents missing from our library. No offering plan and no financial statements for this building are in our library. Your attorney should obtain the current audited financials, the reserve balance, the assessment history, the commercial lease schedule, and — the specific item to chase — the terms and maturity of the 2013 underlying mortgage.

Verify the unit count that applies to you, not the building. City records say 75 and brokerage records say 64. Documented combinations in DOB filings explain at least part of the gap; confirm which combinations were completed and the current apartment schedule before relying on any building-wide per-unit figure.

Lead with the architecture and the provenance. A Thomas W. Lamb Art Deco tower with a MoMA founding-director association is a story that survives scrutiny, and not one the postwar buildings nearby can tell.

Disclose the financing ceiling in the listing, not at the board package. Buyers who discover a 60 percent cap after an accepted offer walk, and the re-list costs more than the disclosure would have. The same is true of the buyer-paid flip tax: a sophisticated buyer will find it and bid net of it, so adjust the ask deliberately rather than absorbing it as a late concession.

Document the capital work. The envelope program through 2018, the gas conversion in 2013, and the 2020 roof and roof deck are all matters of public filing; completion and current condition still need confirming with sign-offs and board materials. Assemble the paper before you list.

Condition drives dispersion here. Renovated high-floor combinations clear at a very different level from estate-condition lower-floor lines. Run the Renovation Cost Calculator against your pricing strategy before deciding whether to sell as-is.

If you're considering 49 East 96th Street, also evaluate:

• 58 East 96th Street — a nearby like-for-like on the same street; the first call for a direct comparison
• 70 East 96th Street — the larger cooperative at the Park Avenue end of the block
• 16 East 96th Street — prewar cooperative inside the Expanded Carnegie Hill Historic District; a regulated alternative on East 96th Street
• 14 East 96th Street — prewar co-op on the landmarked stretch of the same street
• 8 East 96th Street — the Fifth Avenue end of the block; a different price tier and a different buyer
• 1150 Fifth Avenue — the corner cooperative on the same tax block, park-facing and landmarked
• 1158 Fifth Avenue — the other Fifth Avenue anchor of this block
• 1220 Park Avenue and 1230 Park Avenue — Carnegie Hill Park Avenue prewar co-ops; the avenue step-up
• 17 East 89th Street — prewar Carnegie Hill cooperative further south, closer to the museums