A West Village Listing Offers Two Huge Townhouses on One Lot

“It’s a distinguished and somewhat unusual late Greek Revival house,” says Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation. It also hides a secret from the street.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

The low-rise brick townhouses that give the West Village its character aren’t as charming on the inside, at least not to people who can afford them. They tend to feel dark, thanks to those old, historic windows, and they max out at about 18 or 20 feet wide — more railroad than retreat. Then, there’s 46 Perry Street, an 1845 red-brick Greek Revival that was built at more of a 2025 scale. It’s 25 feet wide and four windows across. Then there’s the bonus house — in the rear yard stands a second 25-foot-wide townhouse that’s also around 3,500 square feet, a kind of hidden fraternal twin reached by a private entry from the sidewalk.

To broker Christopher Riccio, who specializes in village townhouses and listed this one for $19 million, 46 Perry hits “the trifecta,” as he calls it. First: “Every megalodon who’s worth $200 million-plus wants a 25-footer,” Riccio says. Second, a buyer could link the two houses through a basement and create a clandestine Frankenmansion, squeezing a monster-size house into a historic district. Finally: There’s the location, a prime block, tree-lined, quaint, and once home to James Agee (38 Perry) and the former Perry Street Theater (31 Perry). In other words, says Riccio, “The demand is gargantuan.”

A second 3,500-square-foot, 25-foot-wide townhouse is hidden behind the main house. Each entrance off the courtyard leads to a separate duplex.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

The seller, Rosalind Resnick, knew what she’d found when she discovered the place more than 20 years ago. “I walked in and was like, ‘Oh my God.’” Resnick bought in 2001 as a freshly minted dot-com millionaire. She had long lusted after Manhattan’s most romantic townhouses, but never had the means in her former life as a journalist (first for trade publications, then at the Miami Herald). When she started freelancing in 1989, she found herself on a niche beat — the early internet. In 1995, she founded a company like the ones she had been covering, an email-marketing platform called NetCreations. It went public in 1999, sold to a European company in 2001, and earned her $40 million. Then came the townhouses. “I have this huge passion,” she says of her eventual collection of eight, from a pint-size half-house at 35 West 12th to another double house at 7 Leroy Street.

Enter the front house and walk back to find this den, where windows look into the rear courtyard and the second house. Resnick remembers being wowed by the original floors and the sweeping staircase (right).
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

But Perry Street remained her trophy. The front house has original wide-plank pine floors, old fireplaces, pocket doors, and crown moldings on the parlor level. On the garden level, thick beams run from the sitting room to the kitchen, where she did a full renovation and upgraded appliances. The back house, whose brick façade has been covered, is less romantic. It has fireplaces and wide, old floorboards, but rooms seem to have less ornamental molding. (It’s now two luxurious duplexes, with a four-bedroom on the bottom and a wider, airier three-bedroom on top that has private access to a roof-deck.) A private street entrance that leads to the back house is rare, says Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation, who called the address “distinguished and somewhat unusual” — if not a total one-off. (131 Charles is also 25 feet wide and contains a pair of similar homes.)

The front parlor, designed to wow guests, still has crown moldings, old pine floors, and a fireplace that may be original. The property is being listed by Christopher Riccio and Elana Zinoman who specialize in townhouses.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

The buildings at 46 Perry are the work of a mason who built around the neighborhood and may have built the rear house to work from before it became a home unto itself. (The building went residential after the Civil War, according to historian Tom Miller’s review of Census and newspaper records.) Tenants over the decades included poet Kenneth Patchen, the cult-magazine editor L. Scott Bailey, and a pair of married actors who wrote and produced a 1949 television show about their squabbles upstairs.

The next owner is probably less enticed by the idea of being a landlord, says Riccio, and more interested in the fact that the tenants are market rate. (No rent-stabilized leases to contend with.) “The fact you have two 25-footers ripe for conversion?” he says. “It’s very rare.”

In the front townhouse, rooms on the garden level show the old beams used to build the home in 1845. The builder, Abraham Frazee, was a local mason who might have used the back building as a shop.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

The kitchen of the front house has been upgraded, and the house now has central air.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

A second view of the den at the back of the parlor level. Resnick, who never lived here, made upgrades for generations of renters. “When I have a tenant, it’s a tenant for life,” she said.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

A bedroom on the top floor that spans the width of the house has four windows — a rarity in the West Village. “You get flooded with natural light,” said broker Christopher Riccio.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

All four bedrooms in the front house have a fireplace.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

The back house also has 19th-century wood floors and fireplaces.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

A dining room in the back house.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman

A private roof-deck is a perk for the renters in the upper duplex in the back house.
Photo: DDReps / Douglas Elliman