190 Bowery

For half a century, 190 Bowery was the building New York could not figure out. Robert Maynicke's six-story granite Germania Bank went up at the corner of Spring Street in 1898, a Beaux-Arts vault built for the savings of Kleindeutschland, and opened for business exactly one year to the day after the plans were filed. The bank renamed itself during the First World War, was absorbed by Manufacturers Trust, and by the mid-1960s the branch had closed. In 1966 the photographer Jay Maisel bought the whole building for a reported $102,000 and moved in. He raised his family across its 72 rooms, grew vegetables on the roof, and stored his negatives in the basement safe-deposit vaults while the facade collected graffiti and most of the city wrote the place off as abandoned. New York Magazine later called the purchase "maybe the greatest real-estate coup of all time."

The abandoned bank was in fact one of downtown's great artist buildings. Roy Lichtenstein rented the third floor from 1966 to 1973, the years his Mirror paintings took shape; the Lichtenstein Foundation's catalogue raisonné records the studio, and Ugo Mulas photographed him at work there in 1967. Adolph Gottlieb moved in the following year, rebuilding his practice at 190 Bowery after a fire destroyed his studio in October 1966. When the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building an individual landmark in 2005, the Maisels showed up to argue against it.

Aby Rosen's RFR bought the building from Maisel for $55 million in 2015 and restored the granite facade while leaving the graffiti on the lower floors in place, an homage to the block the building spent fifty years anchoring. The lease-up that followed reads like a map of the new Bowery: Supreme, owned since 2024 by the eyewear group EssilorLuxottica, runs its Manhattan flagship on the former banking floor, and Industrious, part of CBRE since January 2025, signed for all 33,231 square feet of offices in the fall of 2025 at a $95-per-square-foot asking rent. Now RFR has retained Avison Young's James Nelson to offer the fully leased landmark, its first sale since Maisel handed over the keys. "We've restored it with enormous respect for its history and architecture," Rosen told the New York Post. "Now, for the first time, we're inviting someone else to write its next chapter."

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