Stand on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Prince and look up at the red brick building on the south-west side. It is seven storeys, it holds fifteen apartments, and it looks like it has been there for a century.
It was finished in 2009.
211 Elizabeth Street is one of the more quietly stubborn buildings in Lower Manhattan. It was built slowly, by hand, using methods that had been obsolete for decades, by a design firm that had never put up a building from the ground before. It was finished into the worst housing market in living memory. And it is now the sort of address that gets written about because of who lives in it.
Roman and Williams, building their first
211 Elizabeth Street was designed by Roman and Williams, the firm run by Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch. By their own description it was their first ground-up residential project.
That is worth pausing on. Roman and Williams had built a reputation on interiors, and on a particular kind of warm, worn, slightly theatrical room. Doing a whole building is a different discipline. They chose to do it in the most unfashionable way available.
The developer was 16 Prince Street LLC. The ground floor holds a single retail unit. The fifteen residences start on the second floor and run up to a penthouse.
The brickwork, which is the whole point
The façade was laid by hand by a family of Irish masons. Not machine-set, not panelised, not a brick veneer hung on a frame. Laid, course by course, the way the tenements around it were built.
The windows are wood double-hung sashes rather than the aluminium units that every other new building downtown was using.
The New York Times sent a reporter to look at it while it was still going up. Jake Mooney’s piece ran on 27 July 2008 under the headline “Old World Brickwork, at New World Prices”, which captures both halves of the thing: the labour was antique, the economics were not.
In 2010 the building won a Palladio Award in the multi-unit residential category. The Palladios exist specifically to recognise new work done in traditional methods, so it was the right prize for it.
Finished at the worst possible moment
The apartments went on the market in April 2008.
Anyone who remembers what happened to New York property in the second half of that year can see the problem. The listings were pulled. They came back in the autumn of 2009, by which point the building was finished and empty. The first sale to go through at a cut price was unit 4N, in August 2009.
It did not sell out until December 2010, more than two and a half years after the first listings appeared. A building that took that much care to make spent the better part of three years waiting for buyers.
One detail from the sales campaign has stuck: buyers were given a custom bicycle.
Who has lived at 211 Elizabeth Street
This is the part that put the address in the gossip columns, and it is all a matter of public record.
- Billy Joel bought unit 3N in March 2010 for 3.3 million dollars. It is a two-bedroom of around 1,607 square feet on the third floor, at the Prince Street corner. In November 2025 the apartment was transferred out of his revocable trust into a trust in his daughter Alexa Ray Joel’s name.
- Gabriel Byrne bought unit 2N in 2010 for 3.36 million dollars. He sold it in February 2022 for 5.05 million. He no longer owns there.
- Karlie Kloss and Josh Kushner sold unit 2S in the summer of 2019 for 6.6 million dollars. It was roughly 2,000 square feet with two bedrooms and a terrace of about 1,120 square feet, and it had been listed that February at closer to 6.9 million.
Three sales, three different decades of New York money, one small building.
A note on the year it was built
If you look 211 Elizabeth Street up on a property site you will probably be told it was built in 2007. That figure comes from the city’s own land use file, and on new condominiums that field usually reflects when the plans were approved rather than when anyone moved in.
The building was declared as a condominium in February 2009 and the declaration was recorded the following month, which is the point at which individual apartments can be sold. The architects give spring 2009. The Times was writing about it as a construction site in the summer of 2008.
So: 2009. There is one further wrinkle for anyone who goes looking in the Buildings Department records and finds nothing. The new-building job was filed under 217 Elizabeth Street, not 211.
Where it sits
The corner matters here. 211 Elizabeth Street stands at the northern end of Elizabeth Street Garden, the one acre sculpture garden that the city spent thirteen years trying to build housing on before a settlement in August 2026 preserved it for good.
So the residents of a building that was made by hand to look older than it is have spent fifteen years looking down at a garden assembled from salvaged Gilded Age ironwork. The two have more in common than the rest of the street.
Carry on south and the street changes character twice before it finishes. Nolita gives way to Little Italy, Little Italy to Chinatown, and the shopfronts change language on the way down, which is the argument for walking the whole mile rather than the famous block.
Directly opposite, at 210, is the restaurant space that housed the Michelin-starred Public from 2003 until 2017 and now holds Dante.
Frequently asked questions
Who designed 211 Elizabeth Street?
Roman and Williams, the firm founded by Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch. It was their first ground-up residential building.
How many apartments are in 211 Elizabeth Street?
Fifteen, across seven storeys, with a single retail unit at ground level.
Does Billy Joel still own at 211 Elizabeth Street?
The apartment he bought in 2010 was moved into a trust in his daughter’s name in November 2025. Gabriel Byrne, who also bought in 2010, sold in February 2022.
When was 211 Elizabeth Street built?
Completed in 2009. City tax records list 2007, which reflects the permit filing rather than completion.
A last thought
New York is full of new buildings pretending to be old ones, and most of them are doing it with a printed panel and a sales brochure.
211 Elizabeth Street actually did it. Somebody paid a family of masons to stand on a scaffold on a narrow Nolita street and lay a façade one brick at a time, and then the market collapsed and the building sat there being beautiful and unsold for two years.
It is still there. It still looks a hundred years old. Give it another fifty and nobody will be able to tell.
