After passing through a series of equally colorful, equally wealthy owners, the building was converted into a preschool in the late 1930s and then chopped up into multiple dwellings. By the time Niederhoffer got the deeds for all to recombine them into a single-family home, parts had been stripped of detail while some of the building’s main spaces remained totally intact.

“The lower floors were totally traditional,” he says. “And then you got to the upper floors, and it felt like a TribeCa loft.”

What’s Inside
There are now six floors in total. The ground floor of the house has two entrances. The main one, on Riverside Drive, leads to a prime foyer with marble walls, while the entrance on 76th Street leads to a one-bedroom apartment that has its own kitchen and rear garden.

“It’s the perfect situation for someone with in-laws they like but don’t want see all the time,” Niederhoffer says. “We currently have a grand foyer on the ground floor, but it could easily be converted into a [floor-through] two-bedroom apartment.”

There’s also a cellar, which Niederhoffer converted into a home cinema.

The second floor has a ballroom with 12.5-foot-high ceilings and a fireplace. That floor also has a catering kitchen and a suite with its own marble bathroom and Jacuzzi tub.

Somewhat unusually, Niederhoffer says, they decided to turn the third floor into a master suite, along with a second bedroom (there’s also a full kitchen on this floor), and then convert the fourth floor into a triple-height entertaining area with a kitchen, formal dining room, living room, balcony, and sound-proofed library. (So that’s four kitchens, if you’re keeping count.)

It’s the upper outdoor terrace, Niederhoffer says, that seals the deal.

“You can look down 76th Street and see Central Park, and it has a fire pit—we’d play guitars and sing until 3 a.m.,” he says. (Niederhoffer is chairman of the board of both the New York City Opera and the Harmony Program, a not-for-profit organization that brings intensive music programs to underserved communities.)

The fifth floor is accessed by a curved glass staircase and has another master suite and den, while the sixth has yet another bedroom suite, lit by skylights. There’s also a bilevel roof deck.