- Year built
- 1900
- Type
- Condominium
The Franklin Building at 9 Murray Street carries one of Tribeca's better conversion stories. Built around 1900 as a manufacturing and warehouse structure — notable in its day for a state-of-the-art electrical switchboard, a detail that gave the building its name — it has been reborn as a boutique prewar loft condominium of 30 homes on its upper floors. The result is a building that delivers genuine loft scale and prewar character in a condominium wrapper, on a quiet mid-block stretch of one of Tribeca's most central streets.
The position is unusually convenient. Murray Street runs just north of City Hall and the Civic Center, a few minutes from the Tribeca restaurant core, the West Side waterfront greenway, and a dense cluster of transit — the 1/2/3 at Chambers Street, the A/C and 4/5/6 nearby, and PATH and the Oculus a short walk south. For buyers who want a true Tribeca loft with easy access to both downtown and the rest of the city, the building's location is a real asset.
As a condominium rather than a co-op, the Franklin offers the ownership flexibility — wider financing latitude, easier subletting, pied-à-terre and investment use — that distinguishes it from much of the surrounding loft stock.
Architecture and unit composition
The building presents a handsome, layered facade: a distinguished three-story rusticated stone base, detailed with canopies, supporting six floors of beige-brick shaft and capped by a cornice beneath the top floor. It is a confident piece of turn-of-the-century commercial architecture, the kind of robust masonry construction that converts so well to loft living.
Spanning more than 100 feet of frontage along Murray Street, the building offers two separate entrances and elevator banks — a practical luxury for a boutique building. The 30 residences occupy the upper floors (roughly five through twelve), with commercial tenants below. The homes run large, averaging well over 2,000 square feet per unit, with the loft hallmarks buyers come to Tribeca for: high ceilings, oversized windows, hardwood floors, and deep, flexible floor plates. A common roof deck crowns the building with broad city views.
Building operations
The Franklin runs as a boutique condominium with superintendent service and the practical infrastructure of a well-managed loft building — the common roof deck chief among its shared amenities, along with the dual elevator banks that keep the building functioning smoothly despite its width. It is a pet-friendly building.
As a condominium, ownership is flexible: financing is not capped the way it is at a co-op, pied-à-terre and investment purchases are customary, and resale and subletting are materially freer than at the surrounding co-op loft stock. Purchases clear through a right-of-first-refusal rather than a board admissions process — a lighter, faster path that the building's buyers value.
Local Law 97
- 2024–2029 annual penalty
- $0 (under cap)
- 2030–2034 annual penalty
- $60,174/yr
- Per unit / month range
- $0 – $167
Facade safety — Local Law 11
Safe to live in today — but the last inspection flagged repairs that are due on a deadline, so facade work and its cost are coming. Whether that’s a real concern depends on the scope, the timing, and how the building plans to pay for it — reserves or an assessment — which is exactly what we’d dig into for you.
QEWI = Qualified Exterior Wall Inspector — the licensed engineer the city requires to sign the report (the independent expert, not the managing agent). Source: NYC DOB facade filings (FISP) · The Roebling Research Library.
See the full facade history →Recent sales
With 30 residences, the Franklin Building trades modestly — a handful of homes change hands in a typical year, and large loft condominiums in central Tribeca tend to draw focused, qualified demand when they do. Pricing tracks the Tribeca loft-condominium tier and scales with square footage, floor, light, ceiling height, and renovation depth, with the largest and best-positioned homes commanding the strongest numbers. Because the building's units run well above the neighborhood average in size, per-home prices sit toward the upper band of the local market. Our read on value is grounded in the loft proportions and the condition of the specific residence, not in any single headline trade.
What to know if you’re buying
The draw is loft scale plus a condominium structure on a prime Tribeca block — a combination that is consistently scarce. Buyers should evaluate each home individually, since the loft plates vary in light, exposure, and how prior owners configured them. The largest homes carry a premium that reflects the limited supply of comparable loft condominiums downtown.
Because it is a condominium, financing latitude is wide and the closing path is lighter — a right-of-first-refusal rather than a co-op board package and interview. For buyers weighing a Tribeca co-op loft against this building, that flexibility, plus the freedom to sublet or hold as a pied-à-terre, is often decisive.
What to know if you’re selling
The marketing story is the loft and the structure: prewar Tribeca proportions in a condominium, on a central, well-connected block, with a roof deck and the building's distinctive stone-and-brick presence. Sellers should foreground the loft scale and the condominium flexibility — the two attributes that separate a home here from the deeper co-op loft inventory nearby.
Inventory is limited and turnover unhurried, so a well-prepared listing competes against few direct peers. Pricing should be benchmarked against the building's own activity and the small set of comparable Tribeca loft condominiums, with condition and light driving the final number. Condominium closing mechanics make for a faster, more predictable transaction — itself a selling point to the flexibility-minded buyer the building attracts.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 9 Murray Street, also evaluate these nearby Tribeca loft buildings:
- 25 Murray Street — loft building on the same block
- 111 Murray Street — Tribeca condominium to the west
- 101 Warren Street — full-service Tribeca condominium nearby
- 57 Reade Street — boutique Tribeca loft conversion
- 134 Duane Street — prewar Tribeca loft cooperative
- 108 Leonard Street — landmark Tribeca conversion condominium
The Roebling Team at The Franklin Building
The Roebling Team at Compass specializes in Tribeca and the downtown loft market — the converted commercial buildings that give the neighborhood its character. We publish this profile because buyers and sellers evaluating a building like the Franklin deserve specifics: the loft proportions, the condominium structure, the roof deck, and where the pricing sits against comparable downtown loft inventory.
If you're considering a purchase or sale at 9 Murray Street, a 30-minute consultation is the right starting point.
Get the full picture on this building.
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