Google Maps
In the spring of 2020, an application to reshape one of the odder survivors on its Upper East Side block went before Community Board 8 and came back with a disapproval. The neighborhood’s preservation watchdog testified against it, twice. A revised version won city approval that October, and then the project sat, more or less untouched, while the house drifted on and off the sales market for years. This week it finally found a buyer.
Advertisement
The property is 34-36 East 70th Street, between Madison and Park avenues, and developer David Amirian paid $20,720,000 for it, according to a deed transfer filed with the city on Wednesday and first reported by Crain’s.What he bought isn’t really a house yet. It’s a gutted shell, plus a set of construction plans the Landmarks Preservation Commission signed off on nearly six years ago.
The building started life as two separate row houses put up in 1884 and 1885. In the 1920s the architect William Lawrence Bottomley, who also worked on River House and Turtle Bay Gardens, combined them into a single neo-Medieval residence for the banker James P. Warburg. The result is roughly 37 feet wide, unusual for the block, and it’s protected as part of the Upper East Side Historic District. Listing materials from the Modlin Group, which handled the most recent sale, marketed it as the Warburg Mansion.
The approved plan turns it back into a single-family home of about 12,500 square feet across five stories, with eight bedrooms, seven full bathrooms and a powder room, a rear garden, terraces, a study and a run of walk-in closets. Permit filings list 10 existing dwelling units being reduced to one, as Patch reported. The building was already emptied and stripped when it sold.
Getting those approvals took two rounds. CB8 disapproved the original application on April 20, 2020. The Landmarks Preservation Commission held a hearing eight days later and took no action, then approved a revised version on October 27, 2020. Friends of the Upper East Side opposed both. The group’s main objection was the plan to reface the front of the building in limestone, which it argued would flatten the contrast Bottomley had deliberately built into the facade. It also fought the removal of a second-floor wrought-iron balcony. The developer put the balcony back in the second version, and Friends credited the applicant for listening, but the group still called the revised stonework a downgrade and objected to widening the areaway almost four feet into an already narrow sidewalk.
Advertisement
The price tells its own story. The house first hit the market in March 2024 asking $36 million and cycled through brokerages before landing with Adam Modlin, who found a buyer this spring at a $24.5 million ask, The Real Deal reported at the time. The deed came in nearly $3.8 million under that, and about $2.4 million above the $18.3 million the property fetched in 2018.Amirian runs the Amirian Group, a boutique Manhattan development firm whose past projects include a pair of East Village condo buildings on East 13th Street and a townhouse conversion at 16 East 10th Street.
Patch identified the seller as Douglas Development. Neither Amirian nor the seller has commented publicly on the deal.
Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
