The Rockfall (545 West 111th Street)

The building presents a rusticated two-story base under eight floors of tan iron-spot Roman brick, with stone and terra cotta trim in the Blums' patterned, flattened ornamental manner. The Landmarks Preservation Commission classifies the style as Altered Secessionist and flags the building as altered — the base has been reworked over a century of Broadway retail tenancy, and the storefronts are not original. The West 111th Street elevation, 225 feet of it, is the intact face.

Interior stock reflects the 1940s subdivision. Fourteen apartments per floor across ten floors produces a wide range of sizes, weighted toward one- and two-bedroom layouts, with the recombined units at the larger end. Ceiling heights, room proportions and window scale are 1910 rather than 1940; what changed was the partitioning. Buyers should look carefully at how a specific apartment sits within the original bay rhythm — a subdivided unit can end up with the interior half of a room that was designed as a whole, and a recombined unit can recover it. Exposures split between West 111th Street, Broadway and interior courts.

The building replaced its windows under a contract entered in 2019 and completed in 2020 — a $171,000 base contract plus change orders — so window condition is a solved problem here rather than a deferred one.

The Rockfall runs a doorman, a live-in superintendent and a union staff under a Building Service 32BJ collective bargaining agreement. The amenity set is modest and practical: a fitness room held by the corporation as a separate condominium unit and operated on a fee basis, a 24-hour basement laundry, private storage, two registered bicycle rooms, and a landscaped roof deck opened in 2002 with its own usage policy — open 7 a.m. to midnight, no smoking, no open flames, no pets, and posted quiet hours.

The capital and financial posture, from the audited financial statements on file for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019, is candid and worth reading closely.

The debt is light but the line of credit is drawn. The first mortgage is $2,000,000 with New York Community Bank, interest only at 3.90 percent, maturing November 1, 2027 — about $32 per share of mortgage debt, very low for a 133-unit prewar building. Against that, the corporation had drawn $692,893 on its $1,500,000 revolving line at the end of 2020, having repaid $600,000 during the year. A drawn revolver bearing at least 5 percent is a more expensive form of capital than a mortgage, and it matures with the mortgage in November 2027. Both instruments come due at the same time, which is the refinancing question a buyer should be asking.

Recent history is a period of catching up. The corporation imposed a 9 percent maintenance increase effective January 1, 2020 and a $300,000 capital assessment ($4.7877 per share) billed over eleven months beginning February 2020. In 2017 it purchased a basement apartment from the sponsor for $850,000 for use by the superintendent, investing roughly $970,000 in total after improvements; in 2018 it sold the former superintendent's apartment for $1,600,000 and issued 745 new shares against it. That pair of transactions is why the share count moved from 61,915 to 62,660, and it converted a below-grade unit into a marketable upper-floor apartment — a sensible piece of balance-sheet work.

Reserves are thin and undocumented. Cash designated for future repairs and replacements stood near $252,000 at the end of 2020, against roughly $136,000 in tax escrow and under $16,000 in the operating account. The corporation has not conducted a study of the remaining useful lives of common-property components, and the auditor formally notes the omission of the required supplementary information on future major repairs. The stated mechanisms for funding capital work are borrowing, available cash, maintenance increases, special assessments or deferral. On a landmarked 1910 building where exterior work requires a Landmarks permit and therefore costs more and takes longer, that is the material risk in this file, and it should be diligenced against the most recent statements rather than the 2020 set summarized here.

The building has been through the J-51 program four times, and every grant has expired.

Grants were initiated in 1983 and 1984 — twelve-year exemptions with 90 percent abatements on certified alteration costs of $63,000 and $108,200 — during the pre-conversion period. A third was initiated in 1996 on certified work of $140,300, running through a final partial year in fiscal year 2007. The fourth and last was initiated in 2004 on certified work of $168,700: a fourteen-year exemption with a 90 percent abatement, delivering about $14,058 a year to the whole cooperative from fiscal 2005 through fiscal 2014, and a final partial payment of $4,217 in fiscal year 2015.

The J-51 benefit at The Rockfall burned off after fiscal year 2015. Real estate taxes have been carried at full assessment for a decade, and they are the corporation's largest single expense line — roughly a third of total expenses in 2020. The abatement figure that still appears on the income statement, near $148,000 a year, is the co-op/condo property tax abatement passed through to eligible primary-resident shareholders. That is a personal benefit tied to how you occupy the apartment; it does not transfer with the shares and it is not a building-level tax break.

Ownership form: Cooperative shares with a proprietary lease, held inside a seven-unit condominium. Board approval and an interview are required; the corporation's own published process runs about two weeks for the managing agent's review, two to three weeks for the interview process, and a few days for paperwork.

Board composition: Seven directors elected each June at the annual shareholders' meeting; at least four must be resident shareholders.

Subletting: Permitted after one year of ownership, capped at three consecutive years, with board application, review and interview. Fees escalate by year of sublet — one month's maintenance, then two, then three, per the shareholder bulletin on file.

Refinancing: Requires board review and approval. Budget roughly two weeks for the application.

Flip tax: Not documented in the records available to us, and no transfer-fee line appears in the corporation's income statements. Confirm with the managing agent rather than assuming its absence.

Financing ceiling, post-closing liquidity, pied-à-terre, trusts, LLCs, co-purchase and guarantors: Not published. All are board-set. Ask before you offer, particularly given the sponsor position — a buyer's lender will have its own view.

Alterations: Board approval and a signed alteration agreement are required before work begins. Work is limited to weekdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., neighbors above, below and adjacent must be notified a week in advance, and building service shutdowns require 72 hours' notice and are not scheduled on Fridays. Because the building is in a historic district, any work affecting the exterior also requires a Landmarks Preservation Commission permit.

Pets: Not established in the records available to us. Confirm the current rule.

Maintenance: Due on the first; a late fee applies after the fifteenth.

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 $944/sf across 1 sale. Median listing discount 0.6% 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 1-01883-7501) 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.

Search by BBL. PLUTO files this lot as 2860 Broadway. And check the block before comparing: 545 West 110th Street is a 2006 condominium on Block 1882, and 600 West 111th Street is across Broadway on Block 1894. Neither is this building.

You are buying shares, not a deed. City data reads this lot as a condominium. Apartments transfer as co-op shares. Plan for a board package, an interview and cooperative timelines.

Ask for the current sponsor unit count in writing. Twenty-five of 133 apartments at the most recent audited statement on file is a high concentration for a 1988 conversion, and it can affect which lenders will write the loan and on what terms. Get the number before you get an application.

Model the November 2027 maturity — both instruments. The $2,000,000 interest-only mortgage and the revolving line come due on the same date, and the line was drawn at roughly $693,000 at the last statement on file. Ask what has been repaid since and what the refinancing plan is.

Reserves are thin and the exterior is landmarked. Facade cycles on a designated 1910 building are expensive and slow. The corporation has no reserve study and funds capital work by assessment or borrowing. Read the two most recent financial statements and the current capital plan.

Take no J-51 credit. The last grant expired after fiscal 2015. Underwrite full unabated taxes.

Establish the plan history of the specific apartment. Original 1910 layout, 1940s subdivision, or recent recombination — the three price differently and show differently.

Lead with the architecture, and lead with the source. George & Edward Blum, 1909–10, confirmed in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's own record for this lot. That is a stronger sentence than any adjective, and it survives diligence.

Say what the apartment is. If it is a recombined unit restoring the original plan, that is the story. If it is a 1940s layout, price and present it as one.

Get ahead of the sponsor question. Sophisticated buyers and every lender will find the 21 percent concentration in the financial statements. Presenting it with the current number, rather than the 2020 number, is a materially better position.

Have the fee stack confirmed. Sublet fees are documented; a flip tax is not. Establish with the managing agent whether one exists before you set a net-proceeds expectation, and run the Seller Closing Cost Calculator against the answer.

If you're considering The Rockfall, also evaluate:

• 600 West 111th Street — across Broadway on Block 1894; a 1925–26 building converted in 1988 and held, like this one, as a cooperative inside a condominium. The closest structural peer in the neighborhood
• 600 West 115th Street (The Luxor) — Gaetano Ajello, 1911; another Morningside Heights condop with the same two-tier conversion structure
• 610 West 110th Street — Schwartz & Gross, 1921–22; a prewar rental converted to condominium, and the tenure contrast at similar vintage
• 545 West 110th Street — the confusable address; a 2006 condominium on the adjoining block and an entirely different product
• 2745 Broadway (The Cleburne) — Schwartz & Gross, 1912; the prewar Broadway cooperative comparison further south
• 2780 Broadway (The Aberdeen) — Sugarman & Berger, 1929; a cooperative of similar scale on the same avenue
• 100 Claremont Avenue (Claremont Hall) — the neighborhood's new-construction condominium tower; the modern alternative at a very different price and carry
• 308–312 West 113th Street (The Parkmor) — small new-construction condominium south of the campus
• 285 West 110th Street (Circa Central Park) — 2016 condominium at the park's northwest corner; the amenity-forward contrast