Kaliner's Roundsquare buys Greenwich House site on Barrow St for $24M

A four-story building on Barrow Street that once housed Greenwich House’s music school sold for $24,000,000 in August, and its new owner is now converting it back into what it was built as more than a century ago: one family’s home.

An ACRIS deed shows Greenwich House Inc., formerly chartered as the Co-operative Social Settlement Society of the City of New York, sold 44 Barrow Street to Hondo LLC on August 12. Seventy days later, on October 21, an entity doing business as Roundsquare Development LLC and led by Robert Kaliner filed a DOB alteration application to renovate, enlarge and convert the building from a private school into a single-family dwelling. The settlement society was incorporated in 1902 by social reformer Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, with Felix Adler and Jacob Riis among its founders, and later ran a music school out of the Barrow Street building.

Why it matters

A piece of Greenwich Village’s civic history, built for a nonprofit settlement that trained immigrant children in music, is becoming a private mansion in one of Manhattan’s most expensive zip codes. It is a reminder to developers watching the West Village market that former institutional buildings, schools, and settlement houses still sitting on nonprofit balance sheets can trade at residential-conversion prices once the use is unlocked.

The numbers

• $24,000,000: deed price recorded for the sale of 44 Barrow Street.
• 70 days: time between the August 12 closing and the October 21 DOB filing.
• 1 unit: proposed dwelling units, down from zero residential units under the prior institutional use.
• 4 stories, 11,339 sq ft: existing building size carried into the filing, with a declared construction cost in the millions.

What’s next

The filing, job number M01458956-I1, is in Plan Examiner Review at the Department of Buildings. Architect of record is Wayne Turett of Turett Collaborative Architects, with Domani Consulting filing on the owner’s behalf. The job description specifies converting the existing four-story structure, keeping its stories intact, rather than demolishing and rebuilding.