69 West 9th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 69 West 9th Street by Carter Horsley

This white-brick apartment building at 69 West 9th Street on the northeast corner at the Avenue of the Americas is notable for its pink-brick banding.

The 13-story building is a cooperative with 119 apartments and is also known as 422-430 Sixth Avenue. It was erected in 1957 and converted to a cooperative in 1985. 

Bottom Line

Occupying a prime and very central Greenwich Village location, this white-and-pink-brick apartment building housed the second home of Balducci’s, the city’s leading gourmet food store for many years, provided shelter for Barbara Streisland when she performed across the street at The Lion before moving around the corner to Bon Soir on Eighth Street where she became famous, and encloses a PATH subway station.

Description

The building, which is across from the handsome and large Jefferson Market Courthouse Tower Library garden that was formerly occupied by the Women’s House of Detention, has an entrance to the PATH subway on the side-street just to the west of its canopied entrance.

Its top floor has some corner windows.

Its façade, which is punctuated with discrete air-conditioners, has horizontal pink-brick banding and its center portion on the avenue is setback considerably above the first floor.

The building’s retail space is occupied by Citarella and was formerly occupied by Balducci's, which had moved across the avenue from its open-air stand on Eighth Street at the foot of Greenwich Avenue.

The building is out of context with the architectural ambiance of West 9th Street, West 10th Street, West 11th Street and West 12th Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, which are widely regarded as the most elegant and beautiful streets in Greenwich Village in the Lower Fifth Avenue area even though none of those blocks is perfect.

Amenities

The building has a 24-hour doorman, a canopied entrance with sidewalk landscaping, consistent fenestration, a garage, a bicycle room, a live-in superintendent and a laundry.  It is pet-friendly.

Apartments

Apartment 3C is a studio with an 8-foot-long entry foyer that leads past an enclosed kitchen to a 20-foot-long living room.

Apartment 2J is a one-bedroom unit that has a small entry foyer that leads past a 9-foot-long, pass-through kitchen to a 19-foot-long living room with a dining alcove and a large triangular terrace.

Apartment 7G is a two-bedroom unit that has a 20-foot-long living/dining room and an 11-foot-long kitchen.

Penthouse F is a one-bedroom unit that has a 10-foot-long entry foyer adjacent to the kitchen and an 11-foot-long dining room and leads to a 21-foot-long living room.

Apartment 4B is a two-bedroom unit that has a 6-foot-wide entry foyer opposite an enclosed 7-foot-long kitchen that opens onto a 9-foot-long dining area and a 20-foot-long living room.

Location

This site was formerly occupied by the five-story headquarters of the West Side Savings Bank, which subsequently moved further south on the avenue.  For a while, the chairman of the bank was Charles Otis Bigelow, the operator for several decades of the famous pharmacy known as Bigelow’s that still exists in the middle of the block on the avenue between Eighth and Ninth Streets.

Directly across from this building on Ninth Street for many years was Trudy Heller’s, a popular second-floor nightclub/discotheque.  East of this building, Ninth Street is one of the most attractive residential streets in Greenwich Village west of Fifth Avenue.

There is westbound bus service on 9th Street and eastbound bus service on Eighth Street, which in 2008 began to lose some of its many shoe stores. Eighth Street used to be famous for its art movie house, Bon Soir, the nightclub, a bookstore and a Chinese restaurant, all of which no longer exist.