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Acuity Capital Partners Buys Washington Heights Rental for $21M

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Acuity Capital Partners acquired a six story building at 440-450 Audubon Avenue in Washington Heights for $20.8 million, or $314 per square foot from Crest Realties and Quantum Equities according to The Real Deal.

Acuity Capital Partners acquired a six story building at 440-450 Audubon Avenue in Washington Heights for $20.8 million, or $314 per square foot from Crest Realties and Quantum Equities according to The Real Deal. 

Crest Realties and Quantum Equities had acquired the property at a 2012 auction as part of a $7.8 million deal. Acuity Capital Partners ended up buying the building for three times its purchase price at that auction. 

The 66, 240 square-foot building has 68 rental apartments and three retail spaces. All of the apartments are rent stabilized. Cignature Realty Associates, Peter Vanderpool represented both parties in the transaction. Acuity Capital has sought to omit the affordable housing component at its 66-unit Chelsea residential project at 42 West 18th Street. As part of the push to shift the affordable housing sector elsewhere, it offered to invest 25 percent of its profits to toward the purchase of affordable housing elsewhere. Crest Realties and Quantum Equities. 

The building was built in 1911 and Aubodon Avenue is named after naturalist John James Aubodon, who owned a farm in the area.  The building is surrounded by nearby parks, including Quisqueya Playground, McNally Plaza and High Bridge Park and is less than a half an hour away from all three major airports. 

Today, the neighborhood that lies west of Broadway between 155th and 158th Streets in northern Manhattan bears no resemblance to the wooded vale that John James Audubon bought in 1841 and deeded to his wife, Lucy. The ancient elms and oaks that towered above dogwood and tulip trees on the hillside and the tall pines nearer the water, the streams that flowed through ponds and over a waterfall before joining the river, the enclosures where deer and elk mingled with domestic animals are long gone, displaced in stages of development and progress that culminated in the cityscape that exists today. 

Even the vale itself is mostly obscured by graded streets, building elevations, and the retaining wall that supports Riverside Drive, which at its deepest – near the spot where Audubon’s home once stood – is almost forty feet high. In place of those expressions of rural life, the Audubon Terrace museum complex and a series of apartment buildings have now claimed the tract longer than either Audubon’s home or the subsequent residential enclave that bore his name. However, just below the surface are subtle reminders of what once was, a patch of schist on 156th Street, panoramic views of the Hudson River and the Palisades from the Riverside Drive viaduct, the steep drop from the 155th Street plaza to the cemetery below, and especially the area’s peculiar footprint that refuses to adhere to the rigid grid pattern.

By: Marcel Stepansky 

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