- Year built
- 1915
- Type
- Condominium
- Units
- 4
- Floors
- 6
- Landmark status
- Requires confirmation
- City records and our profile differ. Confirm with building management.
Own an apartment here? See what it would sell for.
A Private Pricing Opinion — what your apartment at 55 Leonard Street 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.
A four-unit condominium is an unusual object in Manhattan. It is small enough that the ordinary machinery of a residential building — staff, amenities, a professional board, a deep reserve — is either absent or carried by four units, in shares set by the declaration. What it buys in exchange is a full floor per unit on a 25-foot Tribeca lot, with roughly 13-foot ceilings and windows on two ends.
The building's recent history is documented and short. An Alteration Type 1 filed in July 2014 and permitted in January 2016 rebuilt an eight-unit loft building into four full-floor residences across six stories at 82 feet. The condominium subdivision into unit lots 1101 through 1104 was filed with the Department of Buildings in February 2018, the declaration was dated December 31, 2018, a temporary certificate of occupancy issued in January 2021, and the final certificate in June 2022. The sponsor then amended the declaration twice, with revised floor plans recorded in March 2023 — so the as-built unit boundaries differ from the original filing, and a buyer's attorney should be reading the current amended documents rather than the 2019 original.
The other structural fact is what the building is not. Almost every notable building within two blocks sits inside the Tribeca East Historic District, and every exterior change on those buildings passes through the Landmarks Preservation Commission. 55 Leonard does not. Checked lot by lot against LPC's own building database, only the Franklin Street–fronting lots on this block are designated; this lot carries no designation, and the Department of Buildings alteration application records the property as not landmarked. Window replacement, façade work and rooftop mechanical equipment here are ordinary construction decisions rather than regulatory proceedings.
Architecture and unit composition
The lot is 25.33 feet wide and 100 feet deep, and the building occupies effectively all of it — 13,870 square feet of residential area across six stories. PLUTO reports a building depth of 194 feet on a 100-foot lot, which is not possible; the field is an error and should be disregarded. The Department of Buildings alteration application carries 13,576 square feet of zoning floor area, which is the figure to work from.
Each residence is a full floor. Listing records describe roughly 13-foot ceilings, oversized windows, exposed brick and gas fireplaces. On a narrow through-lot of this depth, the light comes from the two ends, and the middle of each plate is interior — the defining condition of a floor-through Tribeca loft and the thing that separates a well-planned one from a poorly planned one. Walk the plate before contract and pay attention to where the bedrooms sit relative to the windows.
Building operations
Four residences, an elevator, no documented staff and no amenity program. Every fixed cost — insurance, elevator maintenance, water and sewer, façade obligations under Local Law 11, professional management if the board retains it — is divided among four units by the common-interest percentages in the declaration. Two consequences follow. Common charges per square foot are not necessarily low simply because there is nothing to run; the denominator is very small. And an unbudgeted capital event the reserve cannot absorb may have to be funded by assessment or borrowing. Ask for the current budget, the reserve balance, the most recent Local Law 11 façade filing, and the minutes — in a four-unit building the minutes are short and unusually informative.
Policy framework
Ownership form: Condominium. Transfers close through a right of first refusal rather than a board approval.
Pied-à-terre, LLC, trust and foreign ownership: Not documented; confirm in the declaration, bylaws and house rules. The recorded record includes both individual purchasers and revocable trusts.
Pets, sublet policy and minimum lease terms, flip tax: Not established in the materials reviewed for this building, and no offering plan was located in either library searched. These must be confirmed with the managing agent before pricing an offer or a sale. A shorter honest answer is better than an assumed one: in a four-unit condominium the by-laws frequently depart from the standard form, and the only reliable source is the current declaration, by-laws and house rules.
Real estate taxes: No exemption of any kind. Underwrite full unabated taxes on the specific unit.
Local Law 97
This building is below the 25,000 sq ft threshold at which LL97 limits apply to a building on its own. It is still covered if it shares a tax lot or condominium board with buildings totaling over 50,000 sq ft; confirm on DOB’s covered-buildings list.
See full Local Law 97 analysis →Recent sales
Three of the four residences have transferred to separately named buyers — two to individuals and one to a pair of revocable trusts — with purchase-money mortgages from three different institutional lenders. One of those residences first passed from the sponsor to an affiliated entity, carried a bank facility, and resold to separately named purchasers two years later, without the names alone establishing beneficial relationships; a sponsor-to-affiliate transfer at nominal consideration is a financing step rather than a market data point, and any analysis treating it as a sale will be wrong. The fourth residence has no recorded third-party transfer.
That record answers the question a four-unit building always raises: this is genuine individual condominium ownership, not a rental building inside a condominium wrapper. Pricing is a floor-by-floor argument — the recorded spread between the lower and upper floors here has been wide — and the right comparable set is other boutique full-floor Tribeca lofts rather than the amenity towers a few blocks in either direction. Unit-level transaction history is maintained in The Roebling Research Library and shared with clients during diligence.
Recent closings 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.
| Date | Unit | Apartment | Price | PPSF | vs. Ask |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 4, 2023 | — | 4 BR · 5.5 BA · 5,108 sf | $9,995,000 | $1,957/sf | -16.7% |
| Nov 1, 2022 | PH | 5 BR · 4 BA · 4,544 sf | $7,450,000 | $1,640/sf | -6.8% |
| May 2, 2022 | 4 | 3 BR · 3 BA · 1,939 sf | $3,042,000 | $1,569/sf | -13.0% |
| Dec 1, 2021 | 3 | 1,937 sf | $3,042,000 | $1,570/sf | — |
Market read. Most recent trades (2023) cleared a median $1,957/sf (recorded) across 1 sale.
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-00177-7502; each condominium apartment is its own tax lot). 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 from recorded condo declarations and offering plans.
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Buying here? Condo closing costs with a mortgage typically run 3 to 6% of the price. See NYC co-op and condo closing costs, line by line.
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What to know if you’re buying
Read the amended declaration, not the original. The declaration was amended twice and new floor plans were recorded in 2023. The as-built unit boundaries are in the later documents.
A four-unit condominium governs itself at small scale. Votes and common-interest shares come from the declaration, not the unit count. Meet the building. Read the minutes and the budget. Understand who pays for the elevator when it fails.
No landmark constraint is a real asset here. Exterior work, windows and rooftop equipment do not require LPC approval on this lot. Verify that against your own scope before you rely on it.
Check the tax bill and the reserve. Confirm on the apartment's current bill whether any abatement applies, and review the reserve balance; in a four-unit building, a capital cost is shared among few units.
The policy stack is undocumented. Pets, sublets and any flip tax are not established in the team's reviewed materials. Get the house rules in writing before you go to contract.
What to know if you’re selling
Sell the full floor and the ceiling height. Thirteen-foot ceilings on a floor-through plate with two exposures is the product. Compare the actual dimensions and exposures with newer inventory nearby without assuming exclusivity.
Name the absence of landmark constraint. Buyers planning a renovation price LPC review into their timeline. Being able to say it does not apply here is worth money.
Prepare the documents in advance. Because no offering plan for this building sits in either public document library, buyers' attorneys will ask the managing agent for everything. Assembling the declaration, amendments, by-laws, house rules, budget and reserve position before listing provides the documents needed for review without establishing a ranked cause of delays or a fixed timetable.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 55 Leonard Street, also evaluate:
- 91 Leonard Street — Tribeca condominium two blocks east on the same street
- 10 Leonard Street — small Tribeca loft building; a separate property from this one despite the shared street name
- 14 Leonard Street — boutique loft conversion on the same street
- 155 Franklin Street — nearby full-floor loft residences to the west; compare plate size and ceiling height
- 55 White Street — nearby landmark cast-iron loft conversion to the northeast; the designated-district alternative
- 60 Collister Street — the American Express Carriage House; small-building Tribeca ownership at a different vintage
- 66 Leonard Street — the Textile Building; the larger prewar loft conversion on the same street
- 56 Leonard Street — Herzog & de Meuron's tower directly across the street; the full-service new-construction alternative and an entirely different economic model
- 108 Leonard Street — landmark conversion with a full amenity program; the institutional-scale alternative
More Tribeca buildings
- 53 White Street — 1857 condominium
- The North Moore (53 North Moore Street) — 1910 condominium
- 55 Hudson Street — 1891 co-op
- 55 Warren Street — 1854 condominium
- 55 White Street — 1861 condominium
- 56 Leonard Street — 2016 condominium by Herzog & de Meuron
The neighborhood
For the full corridor — architecture, transit, and pricing across Tribeca — read The Roebling Team Guide to Tribeca.
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. Where this page compares one building or neighborhood to another, that is our analysis of the recorded record — it names the measure, the period and the sample it rests on, and it is an observation about medians rather than a prediction about any particular apartment.
Considering a move at 55 Leonard Street?
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646.939.7375 · c.cohen@compass.com