Inside a $9.75M NYC Townhouse with a Prohibition-Era Tunnel | On the Market
The Oldest Wood-Frame House in the West Village. A Secret Tunnel. $9.75 Million.
New York City's luxury real estate market produces extraordinary properties by the dozens every season. Glass penthouses above Central Park. Landmarked brownstones on the Upper East Side. Converted lofts in Tribeca with 14-foot ceilings and cast iron columns. The market is, by global standards, unmatched in its density of remarkable product.
But 17 Grove Street is in a category of its own.
PropertiesTV featured this West Village townhouse as part of our original New York City luxury coverage — produced in partnership with Architectural Digest's On the Market series — and it remains one of the most singular properties we have ever presented. Not because of its price, though $9.75 million for a freestanding Manhattan townhouse is a serious number. Not because of its size, though the compound includes an accompanying two-story home and former shop. But because of what it is: a piece of New York City history that has survived, largely intact, for over two centuries — and that sits above a secret underground tunnel leading directly to one of the most legendary speakeasies in American history.
Built in 1822. Still Standing.
The story of 17 Grove Street begins with a window sash maker named William F. Hyde, who commissioned the home in 1822 when the West Village was, in fact, still a village — a low-density neighborhood of craftsmen, merchants, and working families on the western edge of what would eventually become the most valuable real estate market on earth.
What Hyde built was a wood-frame structure in a style that was common for its era but has become almost mythologically rare in the centuries since. Manhattan's relentless cycles of development, fire, and demolition have claimed virtually every comparable structure. The island that was once covered in wood-frame homes now has almost none. 17 Grove Street is one of the last.
The exterior tells the story immediately: clapboard siding, salmon-pink accents, original woodwork on the facade. Walking up to the front door, you are looking at a building that predates the Civil War, predates the Brooklyn Bridge, predates virtually every landmark that defines the New York City most people know. The house was here before all of it. And it has remained here, on this corner of Grove Street, through every transformation the city has undergone since.
Inside, the continuity is equally remarkable. Original beamed ceilings. A brick-floored kitchen with the character of a 19th-century farmhouse transported, inexplicably, into the heart of Manhattan. Interior woodwork that has been maintained rather than replaced, preserved rather than updated. The house does not feel like a museum, but it carries the weight of a place where real life has been lived — seriously and continuously — for two hundred years.
The Tunnel
Beneath the house, accessible through a trap door, lies a tunnel.
According to the listing, this passage once served as a direct underground connection to Chumley's — the speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street that became, during Prohibition, one of the most famous illicit gathering places in New York City. Chumley's was not merely a bar where people drank illegally during the 1920s. It was a literary and cultural landmark — a back-room salon where writers, artists, and intellectuals gathered, where F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck drank, where the phrase "86'd" is said to have originated from the bar's street address.
The tunnel connecting 17 Grove Street to Chumley's would have been a practical necessity in the Prohibition era — a means of moving between the two properties without attracting the attention of law enforcement on the street above. Whether the tunnel was used to transport bootleg liquor, to allow patrons to move discreetly between properties, or simply to provide an escape route during raids, its existence speaks to the specific texture of New York City life during one of the most colorful chapters in American urban history.
Chumley's itself reopened in 2016 after a lengthy restoration, and it operates today as a bar and restaurant just a short walk from Grove Street. The tunnel, at the time of listing, had a trap door that had not been opened — the full extent of the passage remained, in the best tradition of New York real estate, a matter of compelling speculation.
The West Village Context
17 Grove Street sits in the heart of the West Village — a neighborhood that has, over the past two decades, established itself as the most consistently desirable address in downtown Manhattan for a specific and identifiable buyer: someone with serious money, sophisticated taste, and a preference for neighborhood character over tower amenities.
The West Village buyer is not looking for a doorman building with a gym and a rooftop pool. They are looking for a block that feels like a neighborhood. Tree-lined streets. Restaurants worth walking to. Architecture that has accumulated meaning over time. The sense — increasingly rare in a city that rebuilds itself constantly — of a place that knows what it is and has decided to stay that way.
The streets around Grove Street deliver all of that with unusual consistency. The proximity to the Hudson River, the preserved Federal-style townhouses on neighboring blocks, the concentration of serious restaurants and independent retail — these are the attributes that have driven West Village real estate to some of the highest per-square-foot pricing in Manhattan despite the absence of the luxury tower amenities that command premiums in other neighborhoods.
For a buyer who understands the West Village, 17 Grove Street doesn't require justification. It is the West Village distilled to its essence — the oldest surviving piece of a neighborhood that has always valued its own history — and it is for sale.
PropertiesTV and New York City Luxury Coverage
New York City is the deepest and most complex luxury residential market in the world. The range of product — from glass supertall penthouses to landmarked townhouses to converted industrial lofts — is unmatched by any other city, and the buyer pool that navigates it is equally diverse and sophisticated.
PropertiesTV's original New York coverage focused on the properties that tell the city's story most compellingly — not the most expensive listings, but the most interesting ones. Properties like 17 Grove Street, where the architecture, the history, and the location combine to produce something that exists nowhere else on earth.
That coverage continues with the relaunched PropertiesTV platform. New York City luxury real estate, presented the way it deserves to be seen.
PropertiesTV is a luxury real estate video platform covering elite residential markets across the United States. Originally featured in partnership with Architectural Digest's On the Market series.