One of Manhattan’s oldest homes is looking for a new owner.
The clapboard-and-brick building on Bedford Street in the West Village, which preservation officials say dates to 1800, has come to market for $12 million, according to a listing that appeared Wednesday.
And the sellers of the 4-story, 3,600-square-foot city landmark are longtime fixtures of downtown Manhattan themselves: Angelina Fiordellisi, the former owner of the nearby Cherry Lane Theater playhouse, and her husband, Matt Williams, a creator of TV shows including Roseanne.
The deal could be a big hit. The couple paid $7.4 million for the four-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath corner property in 2013 through a limited liability company, though Fiordellisi’s signature appears on the deed, according to the city register.
Still, some townhouses have taken many months and a few price cuts to sell, even some with similar pedigrees, a likely result of a lending climate that continues to be dogged by high interest rates.
The property, which features six fireplaces, wide-plank floors and a primary suite with a small terrace, is known as the Isaacs-Hendricks House, named in part for early occupant Harmon Hendricks. A copper magnate who prospered during the War of 1812, Hendricks amassed a large by 19th century standards fortune of millions of dollars, according to the report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission to advance the 1969 creation of the historic district that covers the neighborhood. Joshua Isaacs was Hendricks’ father-in-law.
The 1920s saw the house’s roof raised to accommodate the floor where the primary suite is now located; that decade also resulted in the permanent shuttering of some ground-level windows, the commission says.
Unlike some very old Manhattan houses, such as the 1784 Dyckman farmhouse in Inwood, which the city acquired in 1916 and later turned into a museum, the Isaacs-Hendricks House appears to have mostly functioned as a home since its construction.
Still, establishing that the site has been continuously inhabited can be tricky. Indeed, in the 1920s the home was “purchased by a group of villagers to preserve the character of the block and to prevent the erection of an apartment house on the site,” says the Landmarks report, a move that could have taken it offline for a bit.
In any case, the Isaacs-Hendricks House is not the city home that has been lived in the longest. The East Village’s 44 Stuyvesant St. has served as a home since its construction in 1795, according to a preservation report. And there are even older still-lived-in residences in the outer boroughs, including the privately owned Riker–Lent–Smith Homestead in East Elmhurst, Queens, whose oldest section dates to 1656.
Property records for Bedford Street are clearer from the 1960s onward. In recent decades business executives with ties to Greenwich, Connecticut, owned the property. Wall Street banker Desmond FitzGerald had it from 1981 to 1983, according to the register, followed by lawyer Jerry Friedman from 1983 to 1989.
Next arrived Jacqueline Thion de la Chaume, a French translator once married to actor Yul Brynner, who snapped up the 25-foot-wide site for nearly $1.5 million and began an extensive renovation, according to a deed and newspaper reports from the time. In 2013 De la Chaume’s estate sold the house to Fiordellisi’s shell company, M&A Bedford Properties LLC, the register shows.
Fiordellisi, a former actress whose credits include a touring Annie production, bought the Cherry Lane Theater in 1996 for $1.7 million soon after she and Williams reportedly relocated from Los Angeles in response to the area’s devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake. She then invested $3 million to renovate the dilapidated Commerce Street building, which once counted artist Pablo Picasso and musician Bob Dylan as performers, and turned it into an Off-Broadway venue focused on up-and-coming directors such as Rainn Wilson, who later became a star of the series The Office.
In 2023 Fiordellisi sold Cherry Lane, which contains two stages, to burgeoning movie studio A24, producers of the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, for $10 million. Joining A24 in the deal was private equity giant Taurus Investment Holdings. The theater has not yet announced any new shows.
Besides Roseanne, Williams, who has worked in Hollywood as a writer, producer and showrunner, helped craft major shows of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Home Improvement, The Cosby Show and A Different World, according to a June 2024 profile in The New York Times.
Mary Vetri, the Brown Harris Stevens agent representing the property, declined to comment.
