Make New York Post a Preferred Source Who needs a weekend house upstate when you can have one on the roof?
A West Village penthouse topped with an eye-catching porch-fronted cabin, a carpet of greenery and a working vegetable patch has hit the market for $10.5 million, offering farm-life fantasies six floors above Greenwich Street.
The top-floor co-op at 719 Greenwich St. belongs to developer David Puchkoff, 87, and his wife, writer Eileen Stukane, who have lived there for decades and even exchanged their wedding vows in the living room back in 1988.
Now the couple, who have three daughters, say it’s time for a new chapter.
“I think as we’re aging, a lot of our attention is redirected now to our children and our grandchildren,” Puchkoff told the New York Times. The pair may stay in Manhattan or decamp for the Hudson Valley.
“Right now, it’s all in flux,” he said. “We think of it as an adventure,” Stukane added.
Puchkoff snapped up the six-story brick building, which once operated as a basket warehouse, in 1974 for roughly $220,000. He carved it into a co-op and held onto the top floor for himself.
The rooftop dream came later, sparked by a visit to a friend’s lake house in rural Pennsylvania. With architect pal Lawrence Tobe, he crowned the apartment with a cabin and blanketed the roof in soil, which was shot up the side of the building through a tube. Puchkoff did much of the labor himself.
Getting to the “country” takes about a minute. The elevator opens directly into the apartment, and a gleaming steel staircase with a seafaring look rises from the middle of the living room into the cabin and its compact kitchen.
Push through the screen door and you’re on a wooden porch with a swing and a family-size dining table, gazing past a Japanese maple and beds of sedum toward the Midtown skyline.
“I’m the herb and vegetable gardener,” she said. “We really do well with eggplant, zucchini and lettuce. And there are lots of tomatoes and a big section of basil.”
The porch doubled as the family’s favorite hangout.
“It made us very popular with our relatives,” she said.
Below the greenery sits about 3,060 square feet of loft living with four bedrooms and two baths. Think exposed brick, chunky timber beams, oak floors and big windows framing both Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
The living room centers on a woodburning fireplace Puchkoff built from old cobblestones he said were lying “all over the streets in the ’70s.” The kitchen pairs butcher block counters with a mahogany breakfast bar, and the primary suite comes with a hot tub and views of Hudson Yards. Monthly maintenance runs $5,468, with taxes rolled in.
“It’s an interesting juxtaposition between country and urban,” Compass broker Jim St. André, who has the listing with Michael Maniawski and Trevor Stephens, said.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, but we pretty much are,” he added.
The math may also tempt buyers. The ask works out to about $3,431 per square foot, while the median asking price for a four-bedroom in the neighborhood sits at $21.75 million, according to StreetEasy.
The pastoral perch hasn’t always been peaceful. In 2018, after an anonymous neighbor complained, city regulators slapped Puchkoff with a $1,200 fine and claimed he never had permission to build.
The Department of Buildings also demanded a new certificate of occupancy, and Puchkoff took the city to Manhattan Supreme Court.
“I haven’t done any other work in there except to water my garden, so who am I annoying?” he told The Post at the time, noting he filed permits in 2003.
“It isn’t fair, I’ve already met all the rules and regulations,” he said. “Somebody doesn’t like it.”
The hideaway can’t be spotted from the sidewalk, but it’s no secret. It has turned up in the Times and National Geographic, and it went viral in 2015 when aerial photographer George Steinmetz caught it from a helicopter.
Puchkoff, who developed several residential buildings around the neighborhood, has watched the Village transform.
“We saw this area evolve over the last 50 years from a wild, unruly area to what it is today,” he said.
As for the garden, he’s ready to hand over the trowel.
“I had the good fortune to be part of this garden and now it’s up to someone else to do what they want with it,” he said.
