In 2013, Roy Niederhoffer, the president of New York-based R.G. Niederhoffer Capital Management, Inc., was in need of a place to live. He’d begun a long-term construction project to renovate a house in Manhattan, but in the meantime, he and his young family were living in a rental nearby, a situation he says was short-term at best.

“I was like, I need a place to live now,” he says. And so when he saw that all three units of a mansion on Riverside Drive were up for sale simultaneously, he jumped. “It’s a house that I’d admired for decades as one of the greatest houses in New York. To see that it was up for sale was very exciting, and it had come down tremendously in price.” Together, the three units at 40 Riverside Drive cost Niederhoffer about $12.9 million, according to StreetEasy.

Five years later, his original renovation project is finally complete, so Niederhoffer is reluctantly placing the 10,720-square-foot, 32-foot-wide mansion on the market with Cathy Taub of Sotheby’s International Realty and Dexter Guerrieri and Nicole Kats of Vandenberg at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The house is listed for $15.9 million. Niederhoffer will accept either cash or the equivalent in Bitcoin.

“I’m a big believer in Bitcoin,” he says. “I really am so bullish on it, and I want to own more of it.”

Were someone to pay in the cryptocurrency, Niederhoffer says, he would simply cover his share of the closing costs in hard currency. “Whatever the obligations and brokers fees are, I would pay in cash and keep the Bitcoin,” he says.

It’s a uniquely contemporary development in a house that’s steeped in history.

A String of Owners
Clarence True was a 19th century architect for the city’s nouveau riche who moonlighted as a developer in an attempt to match his customers’ affluence. In one such undertaking, True developed a set of houses on Riverside Drive, which at the time, a “Streetscapes” article in the New York Times says, was “seen as the future gold coast of the Upper West Side.”

Forty Riverside Drive, which was part of this venture, was completed around 1897, with five floors, an elevator, and five original bathrooms, according to an article by New York historian Tom Miller.

The property is on the northeast corner of Riverside Drive and overlooks Riverside Park, the Hudson River, and New Jersey. It was originally purchased, Miller writes, for $125,000 by Henry C. Miner, a congressman and serial entrepreneur who owned a chain of theaters, a drugstore, and interest in locomotive companies.

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