An 8,000-square-foot triplex at 260 West Broadway in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood went back on the market this week at $25 million. The selling point is fixed to the entrance: a mural Keith Haring painted on the walls and ceiling as an art student, decades before anyone thought to sell it.
The asking price is close to four times what the current owner, Adam Zoia, paid when he bought the home for $6.5 million in 2021. The version of the story spreading online says the mural vanished behind drywall. The people who found it describe something more ordinary.
A student show in a thread company’s building
The American Thread Building is an 11-story Renaissance Revival block at the corner of West Broadway and Beach Street, designed by William B. Tubby and completed in 1896. It began life as the Wool Exchange Building and took its current name after the American Thread Company bought it in 1907. At the end of the 1970s the lower floors served as an exhibition space for New York’s School of Visual Arts.
Haring moved to the Lower East Side in 1978 to study painting at that school, two years before the chalk subway drawings that made him famous. He painted the loft piece for a student exhibit there. Accounts split on the year: earlier real estate listings said 1978, while most descriptions now say 1979, and the latest listing hedges with “circa 1979.” He was about 20 at the time. The building was converted into live/work lofts in 1981.
Not drywall, a coat closet
The architects who rediscovered the work, Todd Ernst and Frank Servidio, were building out the apartment in 2001 when they heard that the space had once been a student gallery and that Haring had left something behind. They found the mural tucked behind a closet the owners used for coats and audio-visual equipment. Ernst later compared the moment to “discovering an Egyptian tomb.”
He also explained why its survival surprised him: “It’s next to a sprinkler pipe and it’s made of shoe polish and alcohol, and it’s water soluble.”
Some accounts, including the building’s encyclopedia entry, date the find to a 2007 renovation instead; that December a newspaper report described contractors finding a forgotten Haring in the building. Either way, the work never moved. It is painted onto concrete and runs across walls, ceiling and ironwork, so it cannot come out without being damaged, and a previous owner who hoped to take it along on moving out had to leave it behind.
Five listings, one mural
The loft has been sold and relisted repeatedly since then, which makes it possible to put a rough price on living with a Haring:
- 2014-15: listed in May 2014, then sold for its $10 million asking price, or $1,250 per square foot.
- 2016: back on the market at $13 million.
- 2018: cut to $9.999 million.
- 2021: listed at $7.995 million and sold to Zoia for $6.5 million, about $813 per square foot.
- 2026: asking $25 million, or $3,125 per square foot, after a two-year renovation.
At $25 million, the price per square foot is roughly 3.8 times what Zoia paid five years ago. Some of that reflects the work: the renovation by Sottile and Company and Debono Brothers updated the mechanical systems, added marble floors and Venetian plaster, and reworked the main level so living and dining areas flow together. The lowest floor now holds an eight-seat soundproof cinema, a game room, a gym, an infrared sauna and a cold plunge. The great room keeps its 26-foot ceilings and arched windows.
A bar as a bodyguard
The most unusual addition sits right in front of the art. Zoia had a custom bar built along the mural so guests can see it without brushing against it. “You don’t want people rubbing up against it or like, you know, splashing water on it or whatever,” he said in an interview earlier this month.
Haring went on to paint more than 50 public murals between 1982 and 1989, many of them for hospitals and schools, before he died of AIDS-related complications in 1990 at 31. This one, painted before any of them, comes with a doorman, a roof deck and an asking price of $25 million.
Further reading
Image: Jim.henderson, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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