There is a four-story parking garage on Perry Street, built in 1931, whose top floor is currently listed for $85 million. That sentence should not make sense, and the fact that it does tells you where the top of this market has gone: not up, but inward — into the existing building stock, where scarcity lives and ground-up construction cannot follow.

The project is 125 Perry: Sciame building it, Alf Naman and Ascendant Capital developing, Leroy Street Studio designing with Ismael Leyva as architect of record, Silman on structure. The program is deliberately tiny — roughly 52,000 square feet carrying just seven homes: two penthouses, two townhouses, three full-floor lofts. Sales opened in early 2024 and six of the seven are in contract, with the lender calling the early deals record dollar-per-foot numbers for New York new development. Penthouse East, at $85 million, is the last one standing.

Now look at what the trade is actually being asked to do, because this is the apex of field risk in this city. The building sits in the original 1969 Greenwich Village Historic District, so the 95-year-old brick envelope stays. Everything behind it goes. That means bracing the facade with temporary steel while the entire 1930s interior frame is demolished out from under it — and then excavating a full new cellar beneath the historic foundation line, in West Village ground, close to the river, where the water table pushes back on every pour. Underpinning, sequenced demolition, waterproofing that has to hold for a century: the surprises are all in the building, and there is no clearing the site to make them go away.

The cellar is where the money went. The existing garage was about 40,000 square feet; the finished building is 52,000 — the difference is largely dug, not stacked. Down there the program calls for an indoor pickleball court, a gym, and wine cellars for the townhouses. When a buyer pays Village-record numbers for a loft, the amenities go under the sidewalk, because under the sidewalk is the only direction the historic district allows.

Why does this pencil when a mid-market job three blocks east cannot? Scarcity, and the physics of it. You cannot assemble a ground-up site in the landmarked Village — the district killed that option in 1969, which is precisely why the neighborhood held its value. So the only new product possible is the conversion of what already stands, and the handful of buildings with garage-scale floor plates and reusable bones become irreplaceable. Seven units against that demand means the developer never has to discount, and the construction budget can absorb what facade retention and deep excavation actually cost.

For contractors, the lesson is the same one this column has been writing all month, at its most concentrated. The skills this job runs on — facade shoring, selective structural demolition, underpinning below a live landmark wall, below-grade waterproofing against hydrostatic pressure — are exactly the skills the shed laws, the conversion wave, and the retrofit market are about to demand at scale. The super-prime conversion is where those methods get funded generously enough to be perfected. The middle market inherits the playbook afterward, at middle-market prices.

Completion is expected across 2026 and 2027, and when it delivers, the West Village will have a new benchmark: a parking garage that outsold half the new towers in Manhattan. The building everybody drove past for ninety years turned out to be the most valuable envelope on the block. Worth remembering the next time someone calls an old garage a teardown.

Change Orders is The RFI Wire's opinion column. It reflects the paper's analysis, not the position of any agency or advertiser.