A 17-foot-wide Greenwich Village townhouse once owned by famed German American painter Tony Sarg and rumored to have been lived in by the Rolling Stones has come on the market for $7.95 million, according to data from Streeteasy.com.
Stefan Peter, owner of the home at 54 West 9th Street, told The Real Deal today that the home, which hit the market on Friday, is reported to have served as a home to the Stones for a brief time early in their careers and it’s where they wrote hits such as “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Paint it Black.” While the timeline for the Stones having lived in the brownstone is not immediately clear, those songs were both penned in the late 1960s, early on in the band’s career. Previous news reports corroborate the Stones’ connection to the house.
According to planning documents filed with the Landmarks Preservation commission in 1969, the home was owned in the 1930s by Sarg, the illustrator and star puppeteer credited with creating giant inflatable figures to be paraded down Broadway for the first ever Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. The original owner of the 156-year-old house, designed by architect Reuben R. Wood, was a millionaire tobacco merchant named Christian H. Lilienthal, according to the documents.
Jeremy Stein, a senior vice president at Sotheby’s International Realty, is listing the home with his wife Robin, also of Sotheby’s. While he declined to comment on the ownership of the home, he said it was an investment property and that while it’s currently configured as five rental apartments, it can easily be converted back into a single-family home.
According to public records, Peter, the current owner, owns two other townhouse properties in the city – including a 26-foot-wide brownstone on Garden Place in Brooklyn.
The Greenwich Village brownstone has retained many of its original details, such as plaster medallions and crown moldings, according to the listing. It also has nine fireplaces with white marble mantels and a small south-facing garden in addition to 4,930 interior square feet.
Peter declined to comment on why he is selling the property, which he bought in 1997 for an unknown price. It was previously listed in 2009 and again in 2010 with James Nelson of Massey Knakal Realty Services and with Tatiana Cames of the Corcoran Group respectively. The listings were both in the range of $6 million to $7 million.