Kris
March 26th, 2004, 10:39 PM
March 28, 2004
Uptown Moving Upscale
By JOSH BARBANEL
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/28/realestate/cov.184.1.650.jpg
View from the apartment of Vivian Ducat on the top floor of the Riviera on Riverside Drive at West 157th Street.
WITH apartment prices rising across Manhattan, Vivian Ducat, a documentary filmmaker and creator of multimedia Web presentations, found the home of her dreams on the top floor of the Riviera, an aging but opulent building on Riverside Drive at West 157th Street, built in 1910 on a site where John James Audubon had an estate in the early 19th century.
From the windows of her newly refinished oak-paneled dining room, Ms. Ducat can look out at the Empire State Building, and then she can wander down a long parquet hallway to her bedroom and watch the sun set behind the George Washington Bridge. The price was $650,000 for 1,600 square feet of space, including a butler's pantry and a maid's room. Only a decade ago this was a jarringly high sum for most Manhattan apartments, but today it is a fraction of what a similar apartment would cost farther downtown.
At a time when the average two-bedroom apartment in the rest of Manhattan is selling for more than $1 million, price-numbed refugees like Ms. Ducat have been making the trek uptown to Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Washington Heights and Inwood, places once off the map of many brokers and buyers, to find more space at a lower cost, driving up prices of co-ops and condominiums there, too.
A new study of a decade of apartment sales illustrates this trend. It found that prices in the parts of Manhattan dense with co-ops and condominiums — below 96th Street on the East Side and 116th Street on the West Side — have more than doubled from 1993, when the city was emerging from a real estate downturn, through 2003, with average prices rising from $444,000 to $1.06 million.
But in the last four years, the study showed, the rate of the rise in these traditional Manhattan co-op and condo neighborhoods has slowed, while uptown prices have soared as more and more buyers, once deterred by abandonment, crime and longer commuting times have looked northward. Sales north of 96th Street on the East Side and 116th Street on the West Side, which currently account for 4 percent of apartment sales in Manhattan, are at their highest prices on record, though far below prices in other neighborhoods.
The market survey, by Jonathan Miller of the Miller Samuel appraisal firm, found that since 2000, when the economy and the stock market hit a peak, co-op and condominium prices per square foot in northern Manhattan have risen 63 percent, while prices elsewhere in Manhattan — which started from higher dollar figures — have risen by an average of 26 percent. Prices below 14th Street have risen by 33 percent, followed by 28 percent on the West Side and 19 percent on the East Side.
Mr. Miller said that while demand for multimillion-dollar luxury apartments has picked up in the last few months, demand for more moderately priced condos and co-ops has been strong for most of the last few years. Powering the rise in prices was a combination of low interest rates, increasing demand and a smaller inventory of apartments for sale, as many long-term renters decided to buy — with increasing numbers of buyers venturing northward in search of affordable apartments.
"There has been a surge in activity at the entry level, and it continued to 2003," Mr. Miller said. "We saw improvements despite a weak economy, and this was largely fueled by historically low interest rates."
The report also documents a 7.5 percent decline last year in the number of sales across Manhattan, as fewer owners put their apartments up for sale. The limited supply of apartments helped push up prices, but brokers and economists disagree on the cause. Economists say the low inventory is a sign of a weakness in the economy. Brokers say the market is so strong that owners are afraid to put their apartments on the market until they have already found a new property to buy.
Rae D. Rosen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said that a sluggish job market has meant fewer people moving in and out of New York, and therefore a lower supply of apartments for sale. "Prices get bid up anyway," she said, "because the city remains such a magnet and a place that people want to be."
Steven James, a senior executive vice president at Douglas Elliman, who supervises 300 brokers, said the shrinking inventory of apartment listings had contributed to the price rise and a return of a frenzy of bidding wars this winter "every week, sometimes daily."
He described two one-bedroom apartments in postwar buildings — one in Union Square, one in the West 70's — offered for more than $600,000, with each attracting six or seven bids. "Isn't it sad," he said, "that a one-bedroom at $625,000 is the low end."
Northern Migration
Driven Uptown by Price Pressure
But it is just such price pressure that has driven many buyers who want to stay in Manhattan to look farther and farther uptown.
Throughout the 1990's there has a gradually awakening of interest in uptown Manhattan, as middle-class buyers rediscovered brownstone neighborhoods in Harlem, taking chances on areas that were often perceived as too close to the edge of crime, drug trafficking and decay. For much of this period co-op and condominium prices remained flat.
But over the last four years, brokers say, prices across upper Manhattan began rising in co-ops and condominiums too, as first a wave of people in the arts — artists, musicians, theater people — moved in, followed by a more eclectic and increasingly affluent mix of accountants, architects, schoolteachers and business people.
Many had been renting for years farther downtown, saving up their down payment on an apartment. Without equity in an existing condo or co-op to sell, some buyers do not have enough cash to enter the regular Manhattan apartment game, brokers say. Last year, two-bedroom apartments in upper Manhattan averaged $340,000, but brokers say prices have continued to rise this year.
Mark Jordan, a corporate recruiter, and his partner, Daniel Chisholm, a French teacher at the Collegiate School, spent a year looking to move from their rented studio on West End Avenue in the 70's. They wanted quiet and light and a real kitchen, "not a Bunsen burner in a closet," Mr. Jordan said. These were nonnegotiable, he said.
On the West Side, they found they could afford two tiny rooms, with windows facing walls. Then, Mr. Chisholm went apartment hunting for a friend who was moving back to New York City and discovered Washington Heights.
He found a neighborhood, identified by brokers and neighborhood groups as Hudson Heights, a sliver of land that rises up along the Hudson, west of Broadway, between J. Hood Wright Park at 173rd Street and Fort Tryon Park, that was spared much of the decay that eroded many neighborhoods in the 1960's and 1970's.
Now they are preparing to close on a four-room co-op in a 1930's Art Deco building on Pinehurst Avenue and West 187th Street. They have a separate dining room, a sunken living room and a shared rooftop deck. The price is $310,000 with maintenance of $566 a month.
They were taken with the neighborliness of the streets, the new restaurants that had opened in the last few years and Frank's Gourmet Market, which while "not Zabar's" had enough exotic cheeses and other delicacies to make them feel they were not leaving Manhattan for the wilderness.
"The more we went to the neighborhood, the more we liked it," Mr. Jordan said. "The apartments were pretty big, there was less noise and people seemed less hurried and stressed. People say hello to each other on the street."
The Neighborhoods
Renewal Comes in Different Styles
Upper Manhattan includes a mix of different neighborhoods with different demographics, histories, housing stock and styles of condominium and co-op apartments. In Harlem and Hamilton Heights, a neighborhood to the west of Harlem, there are a mix of older co-ops and newer condos and co-ops in renovated or new buildings, as the neighborhood goes through a period of renewal.
Many of the new buildings were built with government subsidies or on low-cost land, through the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and include a mix of market rate and subsidized apartments for sale. For the subsidized units there are income limits, typically $104,000 a year for a family of four, though most buyers to date have had far lower incomes, housing officials say.
Within the next few years hundreds of additional co-ops and condominiums will be completed, in buildings from 119th Street in East Harlem to Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Central Harlem to Bradhurst Avenue and 145th Street, according to Susan Ponce de Leon, a director of program operations for the department.
In Mr. Miller's market study, which includes sales of apartments with income restrictions, prices averaged $340,000 last year for two-bedroom apartments in Harlem.
At the Rosa Parks, a new six-story red-brick building, with penthouses, set to open this spring at 163 St. Nicholas Avenue at West 118th Street, all 64 condominiums sold out quickly, according to Natasha Sinkov, a broker at Douglas Elliman, even in the face of several price increases. She said contracts had been signed for market-rate two-bedroom apartments for as much as $440,000, while a three-bedroom penthouse duplex with a 1,200-square-foot private terrace went to contract at $670,000. Prices in some of the building's units were kept lower to keep them affordable, under an agreement between the developer and the city, which provided land for the project.
Farther north, Broadway has always been the dividing line, with high-quality housing built for the upper middle classes to the west near the river and the more utilitarian middle-class and working-class housing to the east, according to Andrew S. Dolkart, an associate professor at Columbia University who teaches and writes about architectural history and preservation in Manhattan. The co-op and condo markets are centered on the west side of Broadway.
Last week, Joel Levin and his wife, Tara Collins, were still unpacking boxes in their ground-floor apartment in a four-story building at Hudson View Gardens, with a view across to the Palisades out of a rear bedroom window. Their building faces a garden and stone retaining wall, on a perpetually quiet landscaped private street.
They paid $361,000 for a 1,100-square-foot two-bedroom apartment with a remodeled kitchen and a Sub-Zero refrigerator and were just getting to know their new neighborhood. Hudson View Gardens is a development with 453 apartments in 15 Tudor-style buildings at Pinehurst Avenue and West 183rd Street. It opened in 1924, as one of the first co-op developments in Manhattan.
For Mr. Levin, the location was ideal. He teaches and runs the computer lab at the Fieldston School in Riverdale. She is a lawyer at Legal Aid Society with an office in Lower Manhattan, at the other end of the island. They wanted to stay in Manhattan to avoid what they feared would have been a two-hour commute for one or the other if they had moved to Brooklyn or Riverdale.
They had been paying $1,433 for a rent-stabilized 750-square-foot apartment on West 110th Street near Broadway, the rent low enough to allow them to begin accumulating a down payment. "For years people were telling us the real estate market was going to drop, but we were watching and waiting for eight years," Mr. Levin said.
But by the time they started looking, it was too late for the Upper West Side. So they found a new neighborhood, Hudson Heights, that felt like a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood, but hard by the city. Mr. Levin said there are no washing machines or dryers allowed in apartments, and until the electricity is upgraded, they are permitted to use only low-power air-conditioners.
One 900-square-foot apartment at Hudson View Gardens tracked by Mr. Miller, sold for $50,000 in 1994 and then doubled in price to $118,000 four years later. Last spring, it sold again for $330,000, a sixfold increase in a decade.
Simone Yen Song, a broker in Washington Heights since the mid-1980's, watched co-op prices drop in the early 90's and then witnessed the rebound over the last five years. She said many Manhattanites were scared off by their fears of longer commutes and the perception that Washington Heights is a dangerous place.
Even when Washington Heights had a reputation as a regional drug center, she said, the neighborhood remained stable, never abandoned by the middle class and working people who lived there. "There are perceptions that were never true," she said. "Washington Heights is 50 blocks. This immediate neighborhood has never been close to the drugs. People thought this neighborhood was too far away, until they got on the subway and realized it is 20 minutes to Midtown."
Just across the street from Mr. Levin's home and closer to the river is Castle Village, which opened in 1938 with 579 apartments in a series of 14-story towers set on open lawns with a promenade overlooking the river. Another large co-op development, Park Terrace Gardens, is in Inwood near Inwood Hill Park and the northern tip of Manhattan. Built before World War II, it has 400 hilltop apartments in five buildings.
Not everyone moving northward is a first-time home buyer. Ms. Song told of one buyer, a C.P.A. and investor, and his wife, who paid $630,000 a few years ago for a 2,300-square-foot double apartment in Castle Village with sweeping views of the Hudson and then spent several hundred thousand dollars renovating it, far more than the couple had expected.
But unlike many other purchasers moving northward, they were downsizing. They had just sold a 4,000-square-foot loft in Astor Place, where they had lived for 20 years, for $2 million, and they were searching for a smaller place that was still large enough to hang their art collection.
Living closer to the George Washington Bridge makes the trip to their golf club in New Jersey more convenient, and they were still only 20 minutes from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.
Inventory Dwindles
`We Don't Have Much Product'
As in the rest of Manhattan, the supply of apartments on the market in upper Manhattan dwindled last year — but far more steeply, falling 25 percent, according to Mr. Miller's analysis.
Gus Perry, the principal broker of Stein-Perry Real Estate in Washington Heights, attributed this to a spike in prices in 2002, which brought out a rush of sellers trying to take advantage of the higher prices. Now, "We don't have much product," he said. "Anything that comes on the market in a nice building is basically name your price."
Uptown living does have some inconveniences. In some neighborhoods there are few services and residents are forced to do most of their shopping elsewhere. There are still shells of buildings and vacant lots in some neighborhoods, standing as silent reminders of a troubled past. Crime and open drug sales have sharply declined as they have across the city, but the police are still under pressure in many communities to do more.
With the quality of many local schools lagging, many new residents send their children to private schools and public schools outside the neighborhood. But brokers say, discerning parents can find some higher quality schools or parent-supported alternative programs.
For example, Public School 187 on Cabrini Boulevard is a highly regarded traditional K-8 school. In Inwood, the Muscota New School, an alternative program at P.S. 176 has attracted interest, while the Hamilton Heights Academy is a small parent-founded alternative program in P.S. 28 on West 155th Street now in its second year. Groups of parents are working on other new schools and programs as well.
The perils and promises of the uptown co-op market are evident along upper Riverside Drive, where Ms. Ducat now lives with her husband, Ray Segal, a documentary film producer, and two sons on the 12th floor of an ornate 1910 building with a vast marble lobby and 202 apartments that follows a curve along Riverside Drive from West 156th Street to West 157th Street.
Ms. Ducat grew up on West 72nd Street near Riverside Drive and after some stints in Boston and abroad, returned to live in the 80's on the West Side. But for a decade she yearned for more space in classic old New York apartment building, just across from where she now lives. It was 1992, a time when the New York co-op market was in the doldrums. Ms. Ducat saw an ad in The Westsider, a neighborhood weekly for an apartment in the Grinnell, an eight-story building topped by corner towers at 800 Riverside Drive.
There was a 10-room apartment available, with high ceilings, and butler's and maid's rooms. But her husband said no. He had lived years before on the Lower East Side and knew, he said, what it was like to live in a bad neighborhood. She thought of that apartment often over the years.
Last May, Ms. Ducat, an executive editor at Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures, a group in the university that develops Internet-based courses and presentations, idly typed the name "Grinnell" into Google and rekindled a passion and a quest that led to the purchase of her apartment across the street.
Her new apartment had been renovated by Michael Laudati, a movie makeup artist who frequently works with Harrison Ford. In his spare time, Mr. Laudati buys and restores historic properties in authentic styles. He said he worked on Ms. Ducat's apartment over the course of more than a year, stripping, rebuilding and refinishing cabinets, doors and woodwork and matching period lighting.
During the years that Ms. Ducat pined after a grand old apartment, the neighborhood of her dreams had gone through some extraordinary transformations as well. Jude Dayani, a broker with Orsid Realty who lives in the Riviera said that the entire building had been purchased for about $1 million in 1980 and converted to a co-op in 1985, in the midst of the conversion frenzy.
Values rose and fell and rose again. One six-room apartment on the eighth floor tracked by Mr. Miller sold for $149,000 in 1987 and then sold again in 1993 at foreclosure for $23,000. But earlier this year it was sold a third time for $520,000.
The only apartment now on the market is a one-bedroom unit on the 11th floor with an asking price of $465,000, Ms. Dayani said.
In light of the rising prices, it seems possible that many once elegant rental buildings along Riverside Drive could be candidates for conversions to condominiums in the future.
Now Ms. Ducat has a stack of articles and books about the history and architecture of her chosen neighborhood in a prominent place in her built-in bookcases. In her dining room, she now has space to display possessions long locked away in cabinets: a colorful fruit bowl, a sculpture brought back from her travels in Zimbabwe years ago.
She is a volunteer with a group, Uptown Treasures, that promotes cultural institutions from Hamilton Heights to Inwood, though, she said, she never thought of doing anything like that while living on the West Side. She has come to believe that her new neighborhood, with its mix of cultures and languages, is more authentically New York, than her old neighborhood on the West Side is today.
"Now," she said, "Broadway in the West 80's might as well be suburban, with Coach leather, Godiva chocolate and Victoria's Secret." Her new neighborhood, she said, "reminds me of the Upper West Side of the 1960's."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Uptown Moving Upscale
By JOSH BARBANEL
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/28/realestate/cov.184.1.650.jpg
View from the apartment of Vivian Ducat on the top floor of the Riviera on Riverside Drive at West 157th Street.
WITH apartment prices rising across Manhattan, Vivian Ducat, a documentary filmmaker and creator of multimedia Web presentations, found the home of her dreams on the top floor of the Riviera, an aging but opulent building on Riverside Drive at West 157th Street, built in 1910 on a site where John James Audubon had an estate in the early 19th century.
From the windows of her newly refinished oak-paneled dining room, Ms. Ducat can look out at the Empire State Building, and then she can wander down a long parquet hallway to her bedroom and watch the sun set behind the George Washington Bridge. The price was $650,000 for 1,600 square feet of space, including a butler's pantry and a maid's room. Only a decade ago this was a jarringly high sum for most Manhattan apartments, but today it is a fraction of what a similar apartment would cost farther downtown.
At a time when the average two-bedroom apartment in the rest of Manhattan is selling for more than $1 million, price-numbed refugees like Ms. Ducat have been making the trek uptown to Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Washington Heights and Inwood, places once off the map of many brokers and buyers, to find more space at a lower cost, driving up prices of co-ops and condominiums there, too.
A new study of a decade of apartment sales illustrates this trend. It found that prices in the parts of Manhattan dense with co-ops and condominiums — below 96th Street on the East Side and 116th Street on the West Side — have more than doubled from 1993, when the city was emerging from a real estate downturn, through 2003, with average prices rising from $444,000 to $1.06 million.
But in the last four years, the study showed, the rate of the rise in these traditional Manhattan co-op and condo neighborhoods has slowed, while uptown prices have soared as more and more buyers, once deterred by abandonment, crime and longer commuting times have looked northward. Sales north of 96th Street on the East Side and 116th Street on the West Side, which currently account for 4 percent of apartment sales in Manhattan, are at their highest prices on record, though far below prices in other neighborhoods.
The market survey, by Jonathan Miller of the Miller Samuel appraisal firm, found that since 2000, when the economy and the stock market hit a peak, co-op and condominium prices per square foot in northern Manhattan have risen 63 percent, while prices elsewhere in Manhattan — which started from higher dollar figures — have risen by an average of 26 percent. Prices below 14th Street have risen by 33 percent, followed by 28 percent on the West Side and 19 percent on the East Side.
Mr. Miller said that while demand for multimillion-dollar luxury apartments has picked up in the last few months, demand for more moderately priced condos and co-ops has been strong for most of the last few years. Powering the rise in prices was a combination of low interest rates, increasing demand and a smaller inventory of apartments for sale, as many long-term renters decided to buy — with increasing numbers of buyers venturing northward in search of affordable apartments.
"There has been a surge in activity at the entry level, and it continued to 2003," Mr. Miller said. "We saw improvements despite a weak economy, and this was largely fueled by historically low interest rates."
The report also documents a 7.5 percent decline last year in the number of sales across Manhattan, as fewer owners put their apartments up for sale. The limited supply of apartments helped push up prices, but brokers and economists disagree on the cause. Economists say the low inventory is a sign of a weakness in the economy. Brokers say the market is so strong that owners are afraid to put their apartments on the market until they have already found a new property to buy.
Rae D. Rosen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said that a sluggish job market has meant fewer people moving in and out of New York, and therefore a lower supply of apartments for sale. "Prices get bid up anyway," she said, "because the city remains such a magnet and a place that people want to be."
Steven James, a senior executive vice president at Douglas Elliman, who supervises 300 brokers, said the shrinking inventory of apartment listings had contributed to the price rise and a return of a frenzy of bidding wars this winter "every week, sometimes daily."
He described two one-bedroom apartments in postwar buildings — one in Union Square, one in the West 70's — offered for more than $600,000, with each attracting six or seven bids. "Isn't it sad," he said, "that a one-bedroom at $625,000 is the low end."
Northern Migration
Driven Uptown by Price Pressure
But it is just such price pressure that has driven many buyers who want to stay in Manhattan to look farther and farther uptown.
Throughout the 1990's there has a gradually awakening of interest in uptown Manhattan, as middle-class buyers rediscovered brownstone neighborhoods in Harlem, taking chances on areas that were often perceived as too close to the edge of crime, drug trafficking and decay. For much of this period co-op and condominium prices remained flat.
But over the last four years, brokers say, prices across upper Manhattan began rising in co-ops and condominiums too, as first a wave of people in the arts — artists, musicians, theater people — moved in, followed by a more eclectic and increasingly affluent mix of accountants, architects, schoolteachers and business people.
Many had been renting for years farther downtown, saving up their down payment on an apartment. Without equity in an existing condo or co-op to sell, some buyers do not have enough cash to enter the regular Manhattan apartment game, brokers say. Last year, two-bedroom apartments in upper Manhattan averaged $340,000, but brokers say prices have continued to rise this year.
Mark Jordan, a corporate recruiter, and his partner, Daniel Chisholm, a French teacher at the Collegiate School, spent a year looking to move from their rented studio on West End Avenue in the 70's. They wanted quiet and light and a real kitchen, "not a Bunsen burner in a closet," Mr. Jordan said. These were nonnegotiable, he said.
On the West Side, they found they could afford two tiny rooms, with windows facing walls. Then, Mr. Chisholm went apartment hunting for a friend who was moving back to New York City and discovered Washington Heights.
He found a neighborhood, identified by brokers and neighborhood groups as Hudson Heights, a sliver of land that rises up along the Hudson, west of Broadway, between J. Hood Wright Park at 173rd Street and Fort Tryon Park, that was spared much of the decay that eroded many neighborhoods in the 1960's and 1970's.
Now they are preparing to close on a four-room co-op in a 1930's Art Deco building on Pinehurst Avenue and West 187th Street. They have a separate dining room, a sunken living room and a shared rooftop deck. The price is $310,000 with maintenance of $566 a month.
They were taken with the neighborliness of the streets, the new restaurants that had opened in the last few years and Frank's Gourmet Market, which while "not Zabar's" had enough exotic cheeses and other delicacies to make them feel they were not leaving Manhattan for the wilderness.
"The more we went to the neighborhood, the more we liked it," Mr. Jordan said. "The apartments were pretty big, there was less noise and people seemed less hurried and stressed. People say hello to each other on the street."
The Neighborhoods
Renewal Comes in Different Styles
Upper Manhattan includes a mix of different neighborhoods with different demographics, histories, housing stock and styles of condominium and co-op apartments. In Harlem and Hamilton Heights, a neighborhood to the west of Harlem, there are a mix of older co-ops and newer condos and co-ops in renovated or new buildings, as the neighborhood goes through a period of renewal.
Many of the new buildings were built with government subsidies or on low-cost land, through the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and include a mix of market rate and subsidized apartments for sale. For the subsidized units there are income limits, typically $104,000 a year for a family of four, though most buyers to date have had far lower incomes, housing officials say.
Within the next few years hundreds of additional co-ops and condominiums will be completed, in buildings from 119th Street in East Harlem to Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Central Harlem to Bradhurst Avenue and 145th Street, according to Susan Ponce de Leon, a director of program operations for the department.
In Mr. Miller's market study, which includes sales of apartments with income restrictions, prices averaged $340,000 last year for two-bedroom apartments in Harlem.
At the Rosa Parks, a new six-story red-brick building, with penthouses, set to open this spring at 163 St. Nicholas Avenue at West 118th Street, all 64 condominiums sold out quickly, according to Natasha Sinkov, a broker at Douglas Elliman, even in the face of several price increases. She said contracts had been signed for market-rate two-bedroom apartments for as much as $440,000, while a three-bedroom penthouse duplex with a 1,200-square-foot private terrace went to contract at $670,000. Prices in some of the building's units were kept lower to keep them affordable, under an agreement between the developer and the city, which provided land for the project.
Farther north, Broadway has always been the dividing line, with high-quality housing built for the upper middle classes to the west near the river and the more utilitarian middle-class and working-class housing to the east, according to Andrew S. Dolkart, an associate professor at Columbia University who teaches and writes about architectural history and preservation in Manhattan. The co-op and condo markets are centered on the west side of Broadway.
Last week, Joel Levin and his wife, Tara Collins, were still unpacking boxes in their ground-floor apartment in a four-story building at Hudson View Gardens, with a view across to the Palisades out of a rear bedroom window. Their building faces a garden and stone retaining wall, on a perpetually quiet landscaped private street.
They paid $361,000 for a 1,100-square-foot two-bedroom apartment with a remodeled kitchen and a Sub-Zero refrigerator and were just getting to know their new neighborhood. Hudson View Gardens is a development with 453 apartments in 15 Tudor-style buildings at Pinehurst Avenue and West 183rd Street. It opened in 1924, as one of the first co-op developments in Manhattan.
For Mr. Levin, the location was ideal. He teaches and runs the computer lab at the Fieldston School in Riverdale. She is a lawyer at Legal Aid Society with an office in Lower Manhattan, at the other end of the island. They wanted to stay in Manhattan to avoid what they feared would have been a two-hour commute for one or the other if they had moved to Brooklyn or Riverdale.
They had been paying $1,433 for a rent-stabilized 750-square-foot apartment on West 110th Street near Broadway, the rent low enough to allow them to begin accumulating a down payment. "For years people were telling us the real estate market was going to drop, but we were watching and waiting for eight years," Mr. Levin said.
But by the time they started looking, it was too late for the Upper West Side. So they found a new neighborhood, Hudson Heights, that felt like a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood, but hard by the city. Mr. Levin said there are no washing machines or dryers allowed in apartments, and until the electricity is upgraded, they are permitted to use only low-power air-conditioners.
One 900-square-foot apartment at Hudson View Gardens tracked by Mr. Miller, sold for $50,000 in 1994 and then doubled in price to $118,000 four years later. Last spring, it sold again for $330,000, a sixfold increase in a decade.
Simone Yen Song, a broker in Washington Heights since the mid-1980's, watched co-op prices drop in the early 90's and then witnessed the rebound over the last five years. She said many Manhattanites were scared off by their fears of longer commutes and the perception that Washington Heights is a dangerous place.
Even when Washington Heights had a reputation as a regional drug center, she said, the neighborhood remained stable, never abandoned by the middle class and working people who lived there. "There are perceptions that were never true," she said. "Washington Heights is 50 blocks. This immediate neighborhood has never been close to the drugs. People thought this neighborhood was too far away, until they got on the subway and realized it is 20 minutes to Midtown."
Just across the street from Mr. Levin's home and closer to the river is Castle Village, which opened in 1938 with 579 apartments in a series of 14-story towers set on open lawns with a promenade overlooking the river. Another large co-op development, Park Terrace Gardens, is in Inwood near Inwood Hill Park and the northern tip of Manhattan. Built before World War II, it has 400 hilltop apartments in five buildings.
Not everyone moving northward is a first-time home buyer. Ms. Song told of one buyer, a C.P.A. and investor, and his wife, who paid $630,000 a few years ago for a 2,300-square-foot double apartment in Castle Village with sweeping views of the Hudson and then spent several hundred thousand dollars renovating it, far more than the couple had expected.
But unlike many other purchasers moving northward, they were downsizing. They had just sold a 4,000-square-foot loft in Astor Place, where they had lived for 20 years, for $2 million, and they were searching for a smaller place that was still large enough to hang their art collection.
Living closer to the George Washington Bridge makes the trip to their golf club in New Jersey more convenient, and they were still only 20 minutes from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.
Inventory Dwindles
`We Don't Have Much Product'
As in the rest of Manhattan, the supply of apartments on the market in upper Manhattan dwindled last year — but far more steeply, falling 25 percent, according to Mr. Miller's analysis.
Gus Perry, the principal broker of Stein-Perry Real Estate in Washington Heights, attributed this to a spike in prices in 2002, which brought out a rush of sellers trying to take advantage of the higher prices. Now, "We don't have much product," he said. "Anything that comes on the market in a nice building is basically name your price."
Uptown living does have some inconveniences. In some neighborhoods there are few services and residents are forced to do most of their shopping elsewhere. There are still shells of buildings and vacant lots in some neighborhoods, standing as silent reminders of a troubled past. Crime and open drug sales have sharply declined as they have across the city, but the police are still under pressure in many communities to do more.
With the quality of many local schools lagging, many new residents send their children to private schools and public schools outside the neighborhood. But brokers say, discerning parents can find some higher quality schools or parent-supported alternative programs.
For example, Public School 187 on Cabrini Boulevard is a highly regarded traditional K-8 school. In Inwood, the Muscota New School, an alternative program at P.S. 176 has attracted interest, while the Hamilton Heights Academy is a small parent-founded alternative program in P.S. 28 on West 155th Street now in its second year. Groups of parents are working on other new schools and programs as well.
The perils and promises of the uptown co-op market are evident along upper Riverside Drive, where Ms. Ducat now lives with her husband, Ray Segal, a documentary film producer, and two sons on the 12th floor of an ornate 1910 building with a vast marble lobby and 202 apartments that follows a curve along Riverside Drive from West 156th Street to West 157th Street.
Ms. Ducat grew up on West 72nd Street near Riverside Drive and after some stints in Boston and abroad, returned to live in the 80's on the West Side. But for a decade she yearned for more space in classic old New York apartment building, just across from where she now lives. It was 1992, a time when the New York co-op market was in the doldrums. Ms. Ducat saw an ad in The Westsider, a neighborhood weekly for an apartment in the Grinnell, an eight-story building topped by corner towers at 800 Riverside Drive.
There was a 10-room apartment available, with high ceilings, and butler's and maid's rooms. But her husband said no. He had lived years before on the Lower East Side and knew, he said, what it was like to live in a bad neighborhood. She thought of that apartment often over the years.
Last May, Ms. Ducat, an executive editor at Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures, a group in the university that develops Internet-based courses and presentations, idly typed the name "Grinnell" into Google and rekindled a passion and a quest that led to the purchase of her apartment across the street.
Her new apartment had been renovated by Michael Laudati, a movie makeup artist who frequently works with Harrison Ford. In his spare time, Mr. Laudati buys and restores historic properties in authentic styles. He said he worked on Ms. Ducat's apartment over the course of more than a year, stripping, rebuilding and refinishing cabinets, doors and woodwork and matching period lighting.
During the years that Ms. Ducat pined after a grand old apartment, the neighborhood of her dreams had gone through some extraordinary transformations as well. Jude Dayani, a broker with Orsid Realty who lives in the Riviera said that the entire building had been purchased for about $1 million in 1980 and converted to a co-op in 1985, in the midst of the conversion frenzy.
Values rose and fell and rose again. One six-room apartment on the eighth floor tracked by Mr. Miller sold for $149,000 in 1987 and then sold again in 1993 at foreclosure for $23,000. But earlier this year it was sold a third time for $520,000.
The only apartment now on the market is a one-bedroom unit on the 11th floor with an asking price of $465,000, Ms. Dayani said.
In light of the rising prices, it seems possible that many once elegant rental buildings along Riverside Drive could be candidates for conversions to condominiums in the future.
Now Ms. Ducat has a stack of articles and books about the history and architecture of her chosen neighborhood in a prominent place in her built-in bookcases. In her dining room, she now has space to display possessions long locked away in cabinets: a colorful fruit bowl, a sculpture brought back from her travels in Zimbabwe years ago.
She is a volunteer with a group, Uptown Treasures, that promotes cultural institutions from Hamilton Heights to Inwood, though, she said, she never thought of doing anything like that while living on the West Side. She has come to believe that her new neighborhood, with its mix of cultures and languages, is more authentically New York, than her old neighborhood on the West Side is today.
"Now," she said, "Broadway in the West 80's might as well be suburban, with Coach leather, Godiva chocolate and Victoria's Secret." Her new neighborhood, she said, "reminds me of the Upper West Side of the 1960's."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company