The Wing’s former HQ at historic East Village building lists for $22.5M
All photos by Tory Williams
The New York City headquarters of the now-defunct women’s-only co-working company The Wing is for sale. As first reported by Curbed, the landmarked brick and terra-cotta building at 137 Second Avenue in the East Village hit the market last week for $22,500,000. The Wing, which shut down last summer as a result of the pandemic, moved into the building in 2019, bringing the company’s signature pastel colors and cozy, custom furniture to the 1880s building, which was once home to the Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital.
Designed in the 1880s by the German-born architect William Schickel, 137 Second Avenue, and the adjoined 135 Second Avenue, features a neo-Italian Renaissance style with Philadelphia pressed brick facades ornamented in terra cotta, a new building material at the time.
Philanthropists Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer commissioned the buildings to support the area’s German immigrant community, with 137 Second Avenue serving as a health clinic and 135 Second Avenue as the Ottendorfer Public Library, the city’s first free public library. Notable architectural features of the former clinic building include its round-arched windows, Corinthian columns, and terra-cotta details on the facade.
The building was most recently renovated in 2016 by The Wing’s in-house design team with the goal of making the office feel more like a home, with a central kitchen and comfortable co-working spaces, as 6sqft reported in 2019.
The offices provided members with a variety of co-working spaces, in addition to private conference rooms, a lactation room, and an outdoor patio. In total, the building has three stories, plus a finished basement, and measures more than 15,000 square feet.
According to Cushman & Wakefield, the firm marketing the building, the building will be delivered vacant. Due to flexible zoning rules, the building can be utilized for residential, commercial, or community use. As the listing describes, “this wide array of potential uses makes this a perfect opportunity for a future townhouse or residential redevelopment, or a future headquarters…”
Curbed reports the company’s custom furniture can be included in the sale for any interested buyers.
The Wing opened its first location in Flatiron in 2016 and expanded to other parts of New York and the country, with nearly a dozen total offices by 2019. Amid the pandemic, a report detailing “widespread internal criticism,” and later, the resignation of CEO Audrey Gelman, the Wing shuttered for good in August 2022.
[Listing details: 137 Second Avenue by Hunter Moss, Michael DeCheser, and Bryan Hurley]
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