Murray Hill

At a glance

Where it is: The East Side from roughly East 34th to East 42nd Street, Madison Avenue to the East River, with Kips Bay below and Central Midtown above Share of recorded sales: cooperative 56 percent · condominium 38 percent · condop 4 percent · townhouse 1 percent Market character: 91.6 percent arm's-length across 14,505 recorded sales, sponsor-flagged activity at 4.3 percent — a deep resale record concentrated in a small number of very large buildings Defining control: the Murray Hill Historic District, designated January 29, 2002 and extended March 30, 2004 — a few blocks between Park and Lexington, leaving nearly every large building in the neighborhood outside landmark jurisdiction. Tudor City is designated separately, in 1988 Transit: 6 at 33rd Street; 4, 5, 6, 7 and S at Grand Central–42nd Street; Long Island Rail Road at Grand Central Madison since 2023. Nothing east of the Lexington Avenue line Watch for: the 2016 anchor. Both series stand lower in nominal terms in 2025 than in 2016, so a seller's last-cycle purchase price is not a floor here, and a comparable set that does not reach that far back will read the market backwards

Daily life and getting around

Murray Hill changes register about every two avenues, and the changes are abrupt. Between Park and Lexington in the mid-30s is the surviving piece of the original neighborhood — three- and four-story brownstone-faced row houses above raised basements, mostly Italianate. East of Third the scale changes completely: postwar towers of twenty and thirty stories, canopied entrances, garages, and side streets carrying far more traffic than the ones two blocks west. Between First and Second Avenues the ground opens into the Queens–Midtown Tunnel approach, a sunken road network running from 34th Street to 41st, with the eastbound entrance taken off 36th and the westbound exit surfacing at 37th. At the northeast corner the ground rises: Tudor City sits on a plateau above 42nd Street, reached by stairs and an overpass, with private parks and no through traffic.

Third and Second Avenues carry the day-to-day trade and the densest concentration of restaurants and bars here — an amenity on one block and a noise question on the next. Lexington runs quieter; Madison and the Park Avenue frontage are office and institutional rather than retail. Open space is thin, and St. Vartan Park at First and 35th is the main public option.

Transit is the sharpest value gradient here. The Lexington Avenue line stops at 33rd Street, and Grand Central–42nd Street at the northern edge puts the 4, 5, 6, 7 and S on one complex. Long Island Rail Road service began at Grand Central Madison on January 25, 2023 — a real change in the neighborhood's commuting position, and one that arrived after most of the pricing period the Index measures. East of Lexington there is no subway at all, and the walk to a train from First Avenue on a February morning is the most under-weighted variable in the tower tier. The neighborhood also sits inside the Congestion Relief Zone, tolled since January 5, 2025.

Why Murray Hill trades the way it does

Two facts sit under everything else. This is a resale record with almost nothing else in it — 91.6 percent arm's-length across 14,505 recorded sales back to 1996, sponsor-flagged activity at 4.3 percent. And both published series stand lower in nominal terms in 2025 than in 2016: the cooperative per-room median by 5.5 percent, the condominium per-square-foot median by 4.3 percent, each giving back close to 29 percent once inflation is taken out. Nine years, no nominal gain, on either tenure.

Read together, those numbers close off the usual explanations. At 4.3 percent sponsor-flagged there is no absorption cycle in the record to blame, no wave of first-sales to filter out before a comparable means anything. Households sold to households across the whole period, and in 2025 they sold for less than households sold for in 2016. The local evidence does not support carrying a 2016 basis forward as a floor.

A third fact explains why the record moves as one thing. Those 14,505 sales are spread across only 288 addresses, and the five most-traded account for roughly 22 percent of the entire history between them — 330 East 38th Street at 849 recorded sales, 5 Tudor City Place at 664, 300 East 40th Street at 587, 320 East 42nd Street at 542 and 25 Tudor City Place at 529. A market that concentrated offers deep comparable evidence and very little scarcity to defend a price with. At these addresses a buyer's agent can assemble a same-line comparable set in an afternoon, and no seller has an argument available that the apartment is hard to replace.

The stock

The postwar and late-twentieth-century service buildings are the volume — large elevator buildings with full-time staff, running east from Third Avenue and north toward 42nd. 330 East 38th Street, the 57-story Corinthian, is the outer bound of the type and the most-traded address in the neighborhood: 863 apartments completed in 1988 to a Der Scutt design, built on the former East Side Airlines Terminal site with the tower placed to clear a Queens–Midtown Tunnel tube running beneath the block. 300 East 40th Street, 333 East 34th Street and 400 East 35th Street are the working middle of the same tier, and where most of the 38 percent condominium share sits.

The prewar cooperatives and converted row houses between Madison and Third are the older and much smaller half — 45 Park Avenue, 55 Park Avenue, 80 Park Avenue and 211 Madison Avenue among them. They turn over rarely and their board terms are the most restrictive in the neighborhood. Tudor City is the third product, treated on its own below.

Price the cooperative stock per room with the board terms attached and the condominium stock per square foot. That matters more here than in most neighborhoods, because apartments in Murray Hill run small: a headline price that reads as a bargain against the rest of the East Side frequently will not read that way per square foot. Floor area in the co-op tier is usually an estimate rather than a survey, so treat any per-square-foot figure taken from a co-op listing as approximate, and check room counts against the floor plan.

The covenant, and the district that arrived late

Murray Hill was governed privately long before it was governed publicly, and both regimes are narrower than their reputations. When the Murray heirs settled a final partition agreement in 1847, they wrote restrictive covenants into the deeds of the divided farmland: brick or stone dwellings only, residential use, no commerce, and an explicit bar on museums, theaters, circuses and the exhibition of wild animals. The Murray Hill Restriction held those blocks to row-house use for most of seventy years, then failed — by the 1920s the Morgan family had exhausted its efforts to enforce the covenants, and conversion to apartments and offices moved quickly afterward. That failure is why the brownstone fabric survives in fragments rather than as a continuous district.

Public protection came eighty years later and covers very little. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Murray Hill Historic District on January 29, 2002 — row houses of the 1850s through the 1920s, Italianate and Second Empire, plus three apartment buildings, an architectural office and a church, on a few blocks between Park and Lexington. Two extensions followed on March 30, 2004, taking in 114 to 134 East 36th Street and 124 to 130 East 37th Street and joining the two segments of the original district. Sniffen Court, the alley of ten brick stables of 1863 and 1864 off East 36th Street, was designated separately on June 21, 1966 and is among the smallest districts in the city.

Inside those boundaries, exterior work requires a Certificate of Appropriateness, and the schedule and cost that come with it belong in your read of a building's capital plan. Outside them — where the overwhelming majority of the neighborhood's apartments are — none of it applies. The National Register listing, made in 2003 and expanded in 2013 to some 250 buildings, is larger than the city district and confers no alteration control at all; the two are routinely conflated, and only one constrains an owner.

Tudor City

Tudor City is a separate market inside the neighborhood boundary and behaves like one. Fred F. French built it on the bluff above 42nd Street from the mid-1920s under H. Douglas Ives's design direction, the first buildings opening on September 30, 1927 with roughly 2,800 apartments; the last was finished in 1956. The complex turned its back on the river deliberately — First Avenue then carried slaughterhouses, meat-packing plants and gasworks, so the towers were built with very few east-facing windows, which is why so many apartments look inward at the private parks rather than out at the river. Those parks were nearly lost: after Harry Helmsley bought the complex in 1970 and proposed replacing them with towers, residents fought the plan and the parks were preserved by a 1972 rezoning. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Tudor City Historic District on May 17, 1988, following the National Register listing in September 1986.

Eleven of the thirteen buildings are cooperatives, with one rental and one hotel among them, so most of what trades here is shares and board approval rather than a deed. 5 Tudor City Place and 25 Tudor City Place are the second and fifth most-traded addresses in the neighborhood, so comparable evidence at those two is exceptionally deep; 1 Tudor City Place and 2 Tudor City Place sit under the same designation.

What to know if you're buying here

Build the comparable set back to 2016, not back three years. Both series are down in nominal terms across that span, and a seller working from a last-cycle purchase price will produce a very different number than the recorded history supports.

Use the depth — it is the best thing this market gives you. At 91.6 percent arm's-length, with hundreds of recorded trades at the largest addresses, the sale history at your target building is real market evidence rather than a sponsor's pricing schedule. Pull the address's own record, and the line, before any neighborhood-level figure.

Underwrite the board before the apartment. With cooperatives at 56 percent of the sale record and condops at a further 4 percent, the binding constraint is approval, not price. Get the financing cap, post-closing liquidity requirement, sublet policy and flip tax from the managing agent in writing before you make an offer. The condop share is small but it is the tenure most often mislabelled, and a condop is not underwritten like a condominium.

Establish which side of the landmark line the building sits on. Inside the 2002 district or its 2004 extensions, façade and window work runs through a Certificate of Appropriateness; outside, the same work is a permit and a contractor. The National Register listing is not evidence of either.

Price the block, not the neighborhood. The tunnel approach between First and Second Avenues, the Second and Third Avenue bar corridor and the walk to Lexington vary street by street and floor by floor. See the specific line at night and on a weekday morning before paying a premium for an exposure.

What to know if you're selling here

You have no scarcity argument, so lead with condition and line. Where five addresses carry roughly a fifth of all recorded sales, a buyer can price you against a dozen near-identical apartments. What moves the number is renovation quality, exposure, floor and line — set the price from those and be precise, because the buyer has the same record you do.

Board terms are part of the price. A low financing ceiling or a restrictive sublet policy narrows the buyer pool before anyone sees the apartment. Price for the pool you actually have, and plan a longer marketing period rather than discovering the constraint through three months of failed applications.

Bring the carrying cost forward on day one. Assessments, façade cycles, the underlying mortgage and, in the condominium tier, the tax position on the specific unit are what re-trade deals here. A seller who can answer those with documents in hand removes the most common cause of a renegotiation — and in a market that has not appreciated in nominal terms since 2016, a re-trade is expensive.

Where it sits in the Index

Murray Hill publishes without a caveat — 11,332 index-eligible sales across 65 building profiles, running back to 1996 — and both its series stand on their own rather than leaning on the parent market. It is the East Side's clearest case of a deep, liquid, non-speculative record that still lost ground in real terms between 2016 and 2025, which makes it a useful control against the sponsor-heavy readings elsewhere on the map. See the Roebling Index for the current read.

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Related guides

• Kips Bay — A Buyer's Guide — the neighborhood directly south, and the closest comparable postwar market
• Central Midtown — A Buyer's Guide — across 42nd Street, and a different buyer entirely
• Manhattan Apartment Buying Guide — Pillar 2
• NYC Real Estate Tax & Closing Cost Guide