The Story
The building at 9 Bleecker Street went up in 1884, a three-story Renaissance Revival store building designed by Frederick C. Withers and built by E.H. Day for owner Aaron Wright, as NoHo's Federal-era rowhouses gave way to commerce. Withers, an Englishman who came to America at the invitation of Andrew Jackson Downing and later practiced alongside Calvert Vaux, designed the Jefferson Market Courthouse, the Sacristy at Trinity Church, and the Chapel of the Good Shepherd on Roosevelt Island. Here he worked at rowhouse scale: 20 feet of painted brick with a continuous sandstone band at the sills and a corbeled, dentiled brick parapet. In 1893 William B. Tubby added a one-story rear extension, when the building was storing cigar box labels, the closest the city's record comes to the broker's cigar factory.
Number 9
By the 1920s the block sat at the center of the city's fur trade and the building filled with furriers; Abraham Helman bought it in 1945 and ran Helman Trucking Corp. here until about 1960, and by the mid-1960s loft dwellers had taken the upper floors. In 1973 the Youth International Party moved in, and for 41 years Number 9 was the Yippies' informal headquarters. Dana Beal published the Yipster Times from the building, renamed Overthrow in 1978, and organized the Washington Square Smoke-In that grew into the Global Marijuana March. The ground floor became the Yippie Museum Cafe in 2007, and a foreclosure ended the run in January 2014. The boxing gym that followed called itself Overthrow, after the newspaper, and trained fighters on the ground floor until November 2024.
What You Get
What's for sale is the entire townhouse, delivered vacant: 3,357 square feet across three stories, plus a full-height lower level and sidewalk vault that bring the total working area to 4,577 square feet. Landmarks-approved plans convey with the sale, and the SoHo-NoHo Mixed Use rezoning leaves 2,743 square feet of unused floor area, room to grow the building to 6,100 square feet, subject to Landmarks approval, as a single-family house or as retail below with residential above. Roof rights come with a clear view over the low-rise district. The building traded in June 2025 with the deed recorded at $5.7 million, and returns a year later with the approvals in hand. Next door at No. 7, the Federal-era house where photographer Robert Frank and the artist June Leaf lived and worked for four decades is already in contract.
