After a betting scandal touching the worlds of professional sports and organized crime was revealed this week, a 186-year-old Greenwich Village townhouse suddenly shot up in the rankings of vintage New York City homes with great stories to tell.
“This house has a good one,” Tom Miller, an author who has chronicled the histories of thousands of Manhattan buildings, said of the townhouse, at 80 Washington Place. “There’s Kylie Jenner and Sousa. And now we have a Mafia guy?”
That guy is Thomas “Juice” Gelardo, an alleged associate of the Bonanno and Genovese crime families, who was arrested Thursday along with more than 30 other people. Prosecutors allege that the house was being used to stage illegal poker games controlled by the Gambino crime family. In 2023, according to indictments unsealed in federal court, Mr. Gelardo barged into the house with a group of armed men and assaulted the operator of a competing poker game.
And that is just one link in a chain of boldface names and notable incidents recorded at this address, which has been at various points a single-family home, a boardinghouse, subdivided apartments, vacant and derelict, and, most recently, a renovated townhome and event space with a mix of old stone and sunlight priced at more than $30 million.
It is a “super-rare” spot, said Nicole Palermo of the real estate firm Serhant, which helped the previous owner sell the house in 2024 after more than a dozen years on the market.
“We always said, ‘It’s a penthouse with the privacy of a townhouse,’” she said.
The house may look like just another of the brick-faced rowhouses that dot the streets of Greenwich Village, but the walls are teeming with stories.
1839
William Berwick builds a pair of townhomes at 80 Washington Place and 78 Washington Place, in the Greek Revival style that has come to define Greenwich Village. Mr. Berwick, who owned both houses until 1852, was likely one of many “speculators” who built homes to sell to residents of Lower Manhattan who were migrating north, Mr. Miller said.
1908
Now a high-end boardinghouse, according to Mr. Miller’s research, 80 Washington Place is home to Columbia College students, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Willa Cather and a numerologist named Clifford W. Cheasley.
1919
The composer and military band leader John Philip Sousa acquires the building. “He never lived there,” Mr. Miller said. “I think he bought it as an apartment for his daughter and gave it to her as a gift, because he only charged them $100.”
Sousa’s daughter, Helen Sousa Abert, and her husband hire an architect to renovate the building into an apartment complex. They add an elevator and a fourth story, and they remove the stoop, lowering the original entrance so that visitors now enter through the basement level — essentially the same facade you see today.
1921
According to Mr. Miller’s research, a reverend named John Wade, a tenant at 80 Washington Place, attracts coverage in The Evening World newspaper for his encounter with a bird that flew into his window, fooling him into thinking a robbery was taking place. (Not yet.)
1969
The Greenwich Village Historic District, which includes 80 Washington Place and Washington Square Park to the east, is designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission under Mayor John V. Lindsay.
1970
Now owned by a corporation known as John Philip Sousa, Inc., the building is sold to the Cin-Cin Realty Corporation, according to city records.
1972
Gildo and Marie Rainero buy 80 Washington Place, according to city records. The family would own the building for the next 52 years. Previously, the couple lived nearby at 4 Washington Square Village, which is now New York University graduate housing.
1996
A neighborhood report in The New York Times tracks the sale of marijuana in nearby Washington Square Park. “In recent decades,” it states, “Villagers and tourists seeking the park’s repose have been just as likely to be greeted with a steady chorus of ‘smoke, smoke’ and ‘sense, sense,’ from drug dealers hawking marijuana and sensimilla, a potent strain of the drug.”
2009
Photos captured by Google Street View show a renovation in progress, with the windows of the building boarded up and the front stoop walled off.
2011
A gut renovation by the Clodagh design firm of Manhattan is underway. “It was an awful mess,” said Clodagh, the firm’s mononymous founder, who gutted the interior before redesigning the “very, very special” space as a six-bedroom, 8,700-square-foot home. Among the features: a 700-bottle wine room, a glassed-in sauna, 11 skylights and a waterfall in an old coal scuttle.
“It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done,” Clodagh said.
2012
A New York Daily News article profiles the listing of 80 Washington Place by the firm Douglas Elliman. The home is owned by William Rainero, who says that he grew up in one of nine apartments in the building, and that his family has been in the neighborhood “since before Ellis Island.”
“The listing price is $31.5 million, and that’s where I’ll sell it,” Mr. Rainero tells the newspaper. “There is no reason to sell this for anything less than I’m asking. I would consider renting it for around $115,000, maybe.”
2013
Jonathan Miller, an appraiser with Miller Samuel, notes on his blog that the price of the building has been reduced by a million dollars, and that a new brokerage is now responsible for the sale. “After watching their townhouse sit on the market for a year without a sale, the owners of 80 Washington Place have decided to take a cue from its previous owner, composer and conductor John Philip Sousa: they’re marching on,” he writes.
2016
An Instagram account is created for the house, outlining a new purpose: “Ultra-Luxury Townhouse in Greenwich Village developed by William Rainero — Available for exclusive events & shoots.”
2021
The New York Post reports that 80 Washington Place — still owned by Mr. Rainero, but “not currently on the market” — will be rented by the rapper Travis Scott and his girlfriend, the reality television star Kylie Jenner. The house later appears in an episode of “The Kardashians.”
2023
Bankruptcy: The 80 West Washington Place Real Estate Holdings, LLC files for Chapter 11 protection a day before a scheduled foreclosure sale, according to Bloomberg News, which calls the home a “posh townhouse.”
In October, Mr. Gelardo, armed with a baton, breaks into the house to disrupt an illegal poker game being run on the same night as a competing game, according to prosecutors.
2024
After a dozen years on the market, Mr. Rainero finally sells 80 Washington Place for $17 million in cash to an anonymous buyer under the guise of an LLC. The selling price is about half of what he wanted for the building in 2012.
2025
In June, Marmol Radziner, a Los Angeles-based architectural firm, files plans with the Landmarks Preservation Commission to amend the roof and the fence line of the building. The client is not named.
On Oct. 23, the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department’s Joint Organized Crime Task Force indict more than 30 people on charges of gambling on N.B.A. basketball games and running poker games rigged by Mafia families, listing 80 Washington Place in the indictment.
Rachel Wharton writes about kitchens and related home topics for the Times Real Estate section.
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