Barbara Jakobson's 6,000 Sq Ft UES Townhouse Relists at $8.995M

The Lenox Hill townhouse where the late art collector and Museum of Modern Art trustee Barbara Jakobson lived for nearly six decades is back on the market, listed at $8,995,000. The five-story house at 167 East 74th Street, built in 1910 and expanded in 1956, carries a reported 6,000-plus square feet of interior space, eight bedrooms and six and a half bathrooms. No buyer has been found and no deed has been filed. The property is for sale, not sold.

Why it matters

Jakobson bought the house in 1965 and kept it as her primary residence for the rest of her life, using it as an informal gathering place for artists and writers tied to MoMA, where she served as a trustee. On a Lenox Hill block where single-family turnover is rare, a long-held townhouse coming back to market is a pricing test as much as a listing: it shows how an estate is weighing six decades of Upper East Side appreciation against the cost of modernizing a century-old structure that has not been meaningfully expanded since 1956.

The numbers

At the $8.995M ask for a reported 6,000-plus square feet of interior space, the price works out to roughly $1,499 per square foot, using the listing’s own stated figures. That number is a floor, not a precise count, since the listing rounds the square footage to “over 6,000.” It is also a figure for a house that still carries its 1910 bones and a 1956 addition, which buyers of fully gutted UES townhouses will price differently than buyers of a finished interior. The listing does not disclose land value separately from the structure, so a land-only or building-only per-square-foot split cannot be computed here.

What’s next

The listing sets no closing timeline, and no record reviewed shows the house under contract. Multiple listing identifiers tied to the address over roughly the past two years point to at least one earlier marketing attempt, which means a buyer base has already seen this house before at a different number. For agents tracking New York townhouse inventory, the question is whether the $8.995M ask holds or gets cut again before a deal closes, not whether Jakobson’s estate has already found a buyer. Until a contract or deed shows up in the public record, this remains a former home for sale, nothing more.