BY THE VILLAGE SUN | A historic East Village townhouse will find new life after a devastating fire more than three years ago.
Denham Wolf Real Estate Services, Hirschen Singer & Epstein LLP, and their client, Women’s Prison Association, on May 21 announced the sale of the Isaac T. Hopper Home in the East Village to Self Reliance New York Federal Credit Union. The building, at 110 Second Ave., sold for $7.4 million.
The 8,372-square-foot property, which is a designated New York City landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places, most recently served as a 38-bed transitional shelter dedicated to formerly incarcerated and at-risk women and their children. WPA owned the building for 150 years.
Self Reliance New York Federal Credit Union plans to renovate the building and adapt it for administrative and community needs.
Built in 1838 and designed in the Greek Revival style, the property is one of four buildings originally constructed for Ralph and Ann E. Van Wyck Mead and their family. The townhouse remained a single-family home before WPA purchased it in 1874. It was subsequently named after Isaac Tatem Hopper, a Quaker abolitionist who, with his daughter Abigail Hopper Gibbons, was integral to the creation of WPA.
In December 2020, the townhouse sustained significant damage due to a fire that started in a neighboring property and gutted the adjacent Middle Collegiate Church, displacing the shelter’s residents and staff. Following careful study of the available options, WPA determined that a sale of the property would be most conducive to the building’s restoration and the organization’s programmatic continuity.
Self Reliance New York Federal Credit Union, which promotes the financial well-being and security of its members and, by extension, the larger Ukrainian-American community, plans to renovate the building and adapt it for administrative and community needs. The credit union’s headquarters are located next door at 108 Second Ave.
With around 70 employees and 50 volunteers, WPA continues to operate from its other community sites in New York City and from jail-based offices on Rikers Island and in the Taconic and Bedford Hills State Correctional Facilities.
Attorney Christine A. Coletta of Hirschen Singer & Epstein LLP acted as real estate counsel to WPA, the seller. WPA was represented in the transaction by Christopher D. Turner, MRICS (chartered surveyor for property), and Kate Hrobsky of Denham Wolf Real Estate Services, a real estate services firm that represents and advocates for nonprofits.
I will forever be salty that Faith Popcorn got away with destroying her building, Middle C, Villa della Pace and Cafe Mocha, and damaging the Hopper House, all with literally no repercussions. In a just world she would be in prison, given that she didn’t learn after the first time the careless idiots she hired to work for her set her building ablaze, damaging what was then Caffe della Pace.
I wish they hadn’t demolished the remainder of the old church.