Yes, it is the stuff that dreams, and apartments on the television show “Friends,” are made of. But compared with what his neighbors pay? Meh.
Just across the hall, a tenant named Arnold Warwick, who has had the same address for a half-century, pays less than half that.
“I don’t plan on dying because I don’t want to give up a rent-controlled apartment,” said Mr. Warwick, who is 80. “I pay so little I’m almost embarrassed.”
In New York City, there is no shame in forking over thousands of dollars a month to live in somebody’s basement or crawl space. This unfortunate hiccup in the magic of the city makes the 16,000 remaining rent-controlled units in Manhattan mouthwatering in almost any context.
Cheaper apartments than the ones above the Cherry Lane do exist in the five boroughs, and a few of them even rent for less than three figures. But Mr. Warwick’s apartment, which has four small bedrooms built up around a wide-open living room, isn’t just cheap.
With 11-foot ceilings, exposed brick walls, piles of hardcover books, and views of chimneys and water towers, it is a 1,200-square-foot monument to the Greenwich Village of our fantasies. And at $331.76 a month, it might be one of the very best deals in the city.
His home is nestled on Commerce Street, a windy little road that stood in for Paris on the series finale of “Sex and the City.” A two-bedroom apartment in that area rents for an average of $4,745 per month, according to the brokerage Citi Habitats. And just down the block at 17 Commerce Street, a 2,200-square-foot federal style town house is currently for sale for $4.975 million.
Yet in Mr. Warwick’s apartment, where he raised three children with his late wife, Jane, you can still catch a whiff of the neighborhood’s arty past, long since subsumed by financiers and millionaires. It wafts up the stairs from the theater below.
The Cherry Lane was founded in 1924, in a building originally constructed as a brewery almost 90 years earlier. Today, it holds two stages that stretch between two connected buildings, 38 Commerce and 40-42 Commerce. The apartments are stacked in the floors above, and tenants are sometimes treated to a visceral reminder of what lies below.
“The first week I moved in, I was sitting on the couch home alone and I heard people screaming,” said a second-floor tenant, Heather Campbell. “I almost called the police because I thought someone was being abused.”
The properties are owned by Angelina Fiordellisi, the executive director of the Cherry Lane Theater. She bought them in 1996 — back when the first four rows of one theater flooded with every rainstorm — with the help of her husband, Matt Williams, a successful television writer and producer whose credits include “The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne” and “Home Improvement.” (Ms. Fiordellisi says the set of “Home Improvement” was modeled on the couple’s former home in California.)
Ms. Fiordellisi bought the eight apartments on Commerce Street, with their rambling spaces and slanted floors, because they came with the theater, not because she had a hankering to be a landlord.
“I wasn’t interested in making any money off the apartments,” she said. “I was just hoping they would pay for themselves.”
The apartments bring in about $65,000 in rent a year, she says, and between property taxes and the cost of heat, water, maintenance and management, they just barely break even.
Early in her tenure, Ms. Fiordellisi took possession of two apartments. One was being sublet illegally and the other was not the tenant’s primary residence, she says. But she has also cut her tenants some breaks.
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