- Year built
- 1861
- Type
- Cooperative
- Units
- 3
- Floors
- 5
- Landmark
- No
White Street between Church and West Broadway is one of the most intact nineteenth-century blockfronts in Tribeca East, and 9 White is near the middle of it. Daniel C. Kingsland, a merchant who built repeatedly in this quarter, put up the five-story store-and-loft building in 1861–62, and the marble front — four bays, quoined at the edges, sheet-metal cornice above, cast-iron bay framing with fluted columns at the sidewalk — is essentially the building the Landmarks Preservation Commission described when it designated the district in December 1992. It served the dry-goods trade through the nineteenth century, housing the New York offices of firms out of Milwaukee and Omaha in the 1890s, and it stayed commercial through the era when this whole district did.
Its next-door neighbor, 5–7 White Street, went up in 1868 to Isaac F. Duckworth's design and has housed Artists Space at its ground floor; two doors east, 13–19 White is a Second Empire pile of 1867–68. The block reads as a single argument for why the district exists, and the protection is the point: nothing facing this building can be replaced, and the outlook from its front windows is fixed.
What sits behind that facade now is very small. There are three apartments per PLUTO — a figure the Department of Buildings filings do not consistently confirm, which is discussed below — in a five-story building roughly thirty-eight feet wide and a hundred feet deep. That geometry produces the Tribeca loft in its purest form: single-plate floors with windows front and rear, no interior corridors, and the column grid and ceiling heights of a mid-nineteenth-century warehouse rather than the proportions of an apartment house. There is no doorman, no elevator lobby to speak of, no amenity program and no institutional sponsor in the background. The corporation owns a landmarked marble building and runs it on the maintenance of a handful of shareholders plus commercial income from its base.
That is the investment in one sentence: an irreplaceable plate and an irreplaceable block, carried by a denominator small enough that a single capital event is felt by everyone. The capital record is the ordinary one for a building of this age — a façade campaign filed across 2008 through 2010 with a sidewalk shed, scaffold, material hoist and a filed façade repair application, then a run of individual apartment renovations in 2010, 2014 and 2018. Masonry and marble on a landmarked front recur on Local Law 11 cycles, and each cycle requires LPC review, which makes the work slower and more expensive than the same scope outside a district.
Architecture and unit composition
The building is masonry with cast-iron elements — a marble front over a cast-iron first story, brick behind. Five floors, four bays, one hundred feet deep. Apartments are full-floor lofts; recorded alteration applications describe whole-floor projects rather than line-by-line work, and one 2010 filing describes the scope simply as the renovation of an existing loft dwelling.
The unit count is the one thing a buyer must resolve independently, and it deserves stating plainly rather than smoothing over. PLUTO carries three residential units and five units in total. Department of Buildings alteration applications from 2010 forward carry four dwelling units. Earlier filings from 2002 and 2004 carry five, and shed filings from 2008 and 2009 carry three. Those are not reconcilable from public data. Combinations over four decades are the likely explanation, but the corporation's share schedule and offering plan are the only authority. Ask for both.
The building also holds commercial cooperative space. ACRIS records a commercial cooperative unit transfer on this lot in 2023 alongside the residential share transfers, and PLUTO's total-versus-residential unit split implies non-residential space in the building. Commercial income in a small co-op is a real asset and a real risk at once: it lowers maintenance while the tenancy holds and concentrates exposure when it does not. Ask what the space is, what the lease term is, and what share of the corporation's income it represents.
Policy framework — nothing here is published
This is share ownership, and none of the governing terms are on the public record. No offering plan, proprietary lease, house rules or financial statement for 9 White Street was located in either document library at the time of writing. Everything below is a question to put to the managing agent, not an answer we can supply.
What must be obtained before an offer: the offering plan and any amendments; the current proprietary lease and by-laws; the last two years of financial statements; the current year's budget; the underlying mortgage terms — balance, rate and maturity — and the reserve balance; the house rules; the board application package; and the current Local Law 11 cycle status with the most recent engineer's report.
The terms that will decide whether a deal is possible: the maximum permitted financing and minimum down payment; the board's post-closing liquidity expectation, which in small Tribeca co-ops is frequently expressed as a multiple of annual maintenance rather than as a fixed number; the debt-to-income ceiling; the flip tax and how it is calculated; the sublet policy, including any seasoning requirement, term cap and sublet fee; whether pied-à-terre purchase is contemplated at all; and whether the board will approve a purchase in the name of a trust or an LLC.
On entity and non-primary ownership, the recorded chain is informative but is not a policy statement. Two of the recent share transfers here were taken in the names of limited liability companies. That establishes that the board has approved entity purchases in specific cases; it does not establish a standing policy, and a buyer should not assume one. Every co-op board of this size decides transfer by transfer.
The board package and the interview are the transaction. In a building with three or four apartments, the shareholders are the board, and approval turns on a small number of people reading a complete, well-organized file. Financials, references and a clean explanation of the source of funds matter more here than in a two-hundred-unit house, and the interview is not a formality.
Local Law 97
This building is below the 25,000 sq ft threshold at which LL97 emissions caps apply. No regulatory capital pressure from this law specifically, current or 2030.
See full Local Law 97 analysis →Recent sales
9 White trades as a Tribeca East loft cooperative — full-floor plates, landmarked front, no services — and the correct comparison set is the small converted store-and-loft buildings on the same grid rather than the serviced condominium conversions west of Broadway. The pricing arguments are the plate, the ceiling height, the block and the permanence of the outlook. The counterarguments are the share structure, which narrows the buyer pool relative to a condominium, the absence of any service, and the small denominator carrying a landmarked masonry façade and an underlying mortgage that has been consolidated upward twice.
The resale market is real, if thin by construction. ACRIS records share transfers in 2010, 2013 and twice in July 2022, plus a commercial cooperative unit transfer in 2023 — every one of them to a separate, unrelated purchaser, in ordinary arm's-length recordings. There is no bulk transaction in the chain and no single entity holding the residential stack. In a building of this size, pricing is a floor-by-floor exercise supported by the wider Tribeca East loft co-op set; a building average would be meaningless. Unit-level transaction history is maintained in The Roebling Research Library and shared with clients during diligence.
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.
| Date | Unit | Apartment | Price | PPSF | vs. Ask |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 11, 2022 | 3 | 3 BR · 1 BA · 3,000 sf | $4,000,000 | $1,333/sf | -9.6% |
| Jul 11, 2022 | 2 | 3 BR · 2 BA · 3,000 sf | $4,100,000 | $1,367/sf | -9.4% |
| Mar 12, 2013 | PH | 3 BR | $6,100,000 | -15.9% |
Market read. $/sf is measured on the latest sales with reliable square footage (2022): a median $1,350/sf across 2 sales. The building has traded as recently as 2023.
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-00178-0024) 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.
What to know if you’re buying
Underwrite the underlying mortgage first. It has been consolidated and extended twice, most recently to $1.5 million in 2016, with no satisfaction recorded since. Over three or four apartments, the debt service per shareholder is a large number. Get the balance, the rate and the maturity date before you get attached.
Resolve the unit count and your own share allocation. The public record disagrees with itself. The share schedule in the offering plan is the only document that settles what you are buying and what proportion of the building you are paying to run.
Understand the commercial space. Ask what it is, who occupies it, what the lease term is, and what happens to maintenance if it goes dark.
Expect a real board process. Financing ceiling, post-closing liquidity, sublet policy, flip tax and any position on trusts, LLCs and pied-à-terre use are all unpublished. Request the package early and run the Co-op Board Qualification Calculator before making an offer.
Price the landmark obligation. A marble front with cast-iron storefront elements inside a historic district is a beautiful thing to own and an expensive thing to maintain, and the cost divides across very few shareholders.
What to know if you’re selling
Lead with the plate and the block. A full-floor loft behind an 1861–62 marble front on a protected Tribeca East blockfront is the product. Say what the ceiling height and the floor dimensions actually are.
Get ahead of the diligence. Assemble the financials, the underlying mortgage terms, the reserve position and the current Local Law 11 status before listing. In a building this small, a buyer's attorney will find every one of those questions, and having the answers ready is the difference between a smooth deal and a renegotiation.
Be candid about the board. A buyer who understands the financing ceiling and liquidity expectation up front is a buyer who clears the interview. One who learns them late is a buyer who walks.
Condition drives the number. Loft buyers in Tribeca East pay for finished, well-lit, well-proportioned space. Run the Renovation Cost Calculator against your asking strategy before setting a price.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 9 White Street, also evaluate:
- 53 White Street — 1857–58 store-and-loft converted to seven lofts with a rooftop addition; the closest peer on vintage and block
- 55 White Street — 1861 loft conversion; the same construction year, a larger denominator and condominium tenure
- 81 White Street — two nineteenth-century store-and-loft buildings converted to eleven residences; the same historic district, condominium form
- 10 Leonard Street — 1884–85 Edward Hale Kendall warehouse run as a sixteen-unit loft cooperative; the closest peer on tenure and operation
- 14 Leonard Street — turn-of-the-century warehouses converted in 2000; the conversion-era alternative nearby
- 24 Leonard Street — seven-residence Tribeca condominium; the boutique condominium counterpoint
- 155 Franklin Street — 1882 Neo-Grec loft converted to ten residences; comparable scale, west of Broadway
- 166 Duane Street — 1911 Renaissance Revival loft converted in 1997; the earlier-generation conversion
- 60 Collister Street — 1866 building converted in 2008; small-building operation on a cobbled side street
- 27 North Moore Street — 1905 industrial building converted in the early 2000s; the masonry-loft alternative west of Hudson
The neighborhood
For the full corridor — architecture, schools, transit, and pricing across Tribeca — read The Roebling Team Guide to Tribeca.
The full playbook — what goes in the package, how boards read your financials, the interview, and the timeline — plus sample cover, reference, and personal letters you can adapt.
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.
Considering a move at 9 White Street?
Request a private building brief with the relevant comparable sales, current and off-market availability, and an apartment-specific view of value.
Own an apartment here? See what it would sell for.
A Private Pricing Opinion — what your apartment at 9 White 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.