491 Broadway

The building is a limestone-fronted loft of twelve stories with a mansard crown, three bays on Broadway and a long flank on Broome. It was built as speculative store-and-loft space in the last years of Broadway's dry-goods era, when the district's commercial center of gravity had already begun moving north and developers were building tall on small corners to squeeze value from what was left.

The residential product is whole-floor lofts of roughly 4,000 square feet. Listing records describe barrel-vaulted ceilings reaching about eleven and a half feet in the upper stack, and window walls of up to eighteen eight-foot openings on the corner floors, giving eastern, southern and western light in a single residence. Layouts are open by inheritance rather than by design — these were factory floors, and the ones that have been renovated read as one long room with rooms inserted at the ends. Renovation here is a Landmarks matter at the window line and a structural matter everywhere else; the building's own filings record lot-line and façade openings being cut under permit, which is not a project a buyer should assume is simple.

The lot is inside the original 1973 SoHo–Cast Iron Historic District, verified against the Landmarks Preservation Commission's own database rather than PLUTO's district field. In practice: any work visible from Broadway or Broome — windows, storefront, cornice, mansard, rooftop mechanicals, terrace railings — requires Landmarks review before the Department of Buildings will issue a permit. The building's own record shows what that looks like. A 2018 application for limestone repair, lintel replacement and repointing was filed as landmarked work; so were the 2012 Local Law 11 repairs to the west and south elevations, the 2010 parapet repair and waterproofing, and the 2007 mansard coping repair. Buyers planning to replace windows should assume a Certificate of Appropriateness and budget the timeline, not just the glass.

No certificate of occupancy for 491 Broadway appears in Department of Buildings records at all. For an 1897 building this is unremarkable in itself — buildings completed before the certificate regime often never carried one — but the more recent history matters. The Alteration Type 1 approved in March 2014 was filed expressly to obtain an amended certificate of occupancy recording nine dwelling units, and no certificate appears to have been issued against it.

Two consequences for a buyer. First, some lenders ask for a certificate reflecting legal residential use, and its absence can slow or complicate a co-op loan even where the board's financing terms are permissive. Second, the occupancy classification itself is JLWQA, which in principle conditions residential occupancy on artist certification. Enforcement of the artist-certification requirement in SoHo has been inconsistent for decades and the December 2021 SoHo/NoHo rezoning changed the forward-looking framework, but the recorded classification on this building is what a lender's counsel and a buyer's counsel will read. Ask the managing agent directly: what does the building's current occupancy classification say, has any shareholder been asked to demonstrate artist certification, and what is outstanding on the 2013 alteration.

There is no doorman and no amenity program; this is a self-directed loft building with commercial tenancy at the base. The filing record shows a cooperative that does its capital work rather than defers it: parapet repair and waterproofing in 2010, Local Law 11 façade repairs on the west and south elevations in 2012, replacement of the roof guardrails in 2014, exterior repairs at the fifth-floor fire stair wall in 2014, a low-pressure boiler and burner replacement in 2015, limestone repair and repointing in 2018, and an automatic smoke, heat and carbon-monoxide detection and sprinkler alarm system filed in 2018. Sidewalk sheds appear in 2007, 2012 and 2015 — the ordinary rhythm of a landmarked masonry building on two street frontages.

Corporate leverage is low. The $850,000 mortgage recorded in June 2014 was satisfied in June 2024 and replaced with roughly $835,000 of new financing. A building carrying that little debt against this asset base has capacity, which is the relevant fact when a façade cycle lands.

Nothing in this building's policy stack is published in a source we would rely on. No offering plan, proprietary lease, house rules or audited financial statement for 491 Broadway Realty Corp. is presently held in The Roebling Research Library, and management-sourced summaries for buildings of this size are frequently stale.

That means the following must all come from the managing agent, in writing, before an offer is made:

• Board package and interview. Assume a full financial package and an in-person interview. In a building of roughly ten shareholders, the board is the neighbors, and the interview is real.
• Financing ceiling and minimum down. Small loft co-ops with commercial income frequently run tighter than the market standard. Get the number.
• Post-closing liquidity. The most common reason a qualified buyer fails in a building this size. Ask what the board expects in months of maintenance or as a multiple of the purchase price.
• Sublet policy. Seasoning requirement, term cap, renewal treatment, sublet fee, and whether sub-subletting is prohibited.
• Flip tax. Existence, rate, base — percentage of price, per-share, or profit-based — and which side pays.
• Pied-à-terre, trusts and limited liability companies. These interact with the JLWQA classification in ways that a conventional co-op question does not. A building whose residential certification rests on live-work occupancy by artists may take a harder line on non-primary residence and entity ownership than the market average. Ask the question in those terms.
• The commercial units. Confirm what the corporation owns at the base, what it is leased for, when those leases expire, and how much of the budget depends on them.

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 (2024): a median $1,175/sf across 1 sale. The building has traded as recently as 2025. Median listing discount 7.5% 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 1-00484-0026) 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.

Ida Applebroog, the American painter represented by Hauser & Wirth, kept her home and studio on the full eighth floor here. She worked in SoHo from 1974 and spent more than forty of those years in this building; the loft — roughly 4,000 square feet under barrel-vaulted ceilings, with eighteen eight-foot windows — is described in the gallery's own published interviews with the artist. Applebroog died in 2023, and public records show her estate conveying the eighth floor in 2025.

Camille Billops and James V. Hatch bought a loft here in 1973 and turned it into the Hatch-Billops Collection, an archive of African-American cultural history, and into the salon that produced Artist and Influence, the journal of recorded oral histories the pair published from 1981. Emory University's Rose Library, which now holds the collection, records the SoHo loft as the place where more than 1,500 interviews were gathered. Billops, an artist and filmmaker, died in 2019; Hatch, a theater historian, in 2020.

The certificate of occupancy and the JLWQA classification are one conversation, not two. Raise them together with the managing agent and with your lender before you spend money on an application. A co-op loan on a JLWQA floor in a building with no certificate on file is a solvable problem, but it is not an invisible one.

Underwrite the commercial income honestly. Retail at the base and an office floor above it are carrying part of this building's budget. Ask for the leases, the expirations, and the board's plan if a tenant goes dark. In a ten-shareholder building, one vacant commercial floor is an assessment.

Ask about the fourth floor. It changed hands in 2022 as a commercial cooperative unit. Whether it is being used commercially, whether it is expected to be reclassified, and what the corporation's position is are all worth knowing before you buy into a building whose unit count varies by source.

Budget the exterior. Two landmarked street elevations, a mansard, and a Local Law 11 cycle that has already produced sheds three times since 2007. The corporation's low debt is what makes that manageable — confirm the reserve position and any assessment history in the audited financials.

Verify every policy number. Nothing published about this building's financing ceiling, sublet terms or flip tax should be treated as current. Run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator once the managing agent gives you the real terms, not before.

Lead with the physical facts a floor plan cannot show. Ceiling height, window count, exposure and the fact that the twelfth-story massing cannot be replicated on this lot. Buyers shopping SoHo lofts compare square footage; this building's advantage is light and outlook.

Assemble the diligence package before you list. Board policy terms in writing, the current audited financials, the commercial lease summary, the status of the 2013 alteration and the certificate of occupancy. Every one of these will be asked for, and a seller who has them ready shortens the deal by weeks.

Price against renovation reality. Landmarked window openings, an old service core and floor plates that were never laid out as residences mean the next owner's budget is part of your pricing math. Run the Renovation Cost Calculator against your asking strategy.

If you're considering 491 Broadway, also evaluate:

• 515 Broadway — the block-through Queen Anne loft cooperative on the same block; the closest like-for-like on tenure and scale
• 72 Mercer Street — the new-construction condominium on this block; the modern alternative behind the same landmark frontage
• 476 Broadway — cast-iron loft conversion directly across Broadway
• 475 Broadway — through-block loft condominium two blocks south; the condominium comparison
• 47 Mercer Street — five-loft condominium with an explicit JLWQA offering; the closest artist-occupancy analogue
• 543 Broadway — Broadway loft conversion north of Spring Street
• 583 Broadway — large Broadway loft building at the NoHo edge
• 93 Mercer Street — small SoHo loft building on the parallel street
• 102 Wooster Street — boutique SoHo loft conversion west of Broadway
• 470 Broome Street — loft building on the same cross street