The couple who own the townhouse and apartments connected by the Staple Street skybridge — Stewart Butterfield, who founded Slack, and Jen Rubio, who founded Away luggage — are selling it for $29.95 million. City records show they bought it in 2022 for $20 million — and it looks to me that it has not been touched since. (Thanks to G. for sending the listing.)

Before that, it languished on the market for years. It was first listed in 2015 by Zoran Ladicorbic, the American fashion designer from the ‘90s known by his first name only, who bought 9 Jay in 1985 for $499,000. (The New York Times in a 1999 review called him the “master of deluxe minimalism,” or the Gap for the very rich.) I toured it in January 2019, when the property had been picked up by Sotheby’s and listed for $35 million (these photos are from that Loft Peeping Extreme Edition).

It’s really two properties plus the bridge: the 1907 townhouse on the west side of the bridge – 9 Jay – was originally the carriage house for the building on the east side of it – 67 Hudson – which, when it was built in 1900, was New York Hospital. Ambulances pulled into the Jay Street building (it has two curb cuts – one on Staple and one on Jay) and patients were taken upstairs and across the bridge to the hospital.

After buying 9 Jay, which came with the bridge, Zoran bought 3A and 3B at 67 Hudson for $300,000, combining those two apartments and completing the connection to the townhouse. According to Zoran in 2019, who lived in Europe at the time, he beat out Andy Warhol in a bidding war for 9 Jay. He then put more than $600,000 (!!) into the two apartments in the ‘90s, but left the ground floor of 9 Jay and the basement much as it was. (I can see in the listing photos that the new owners did clear out the mannequins from the garage.)

Back in 2019, the townhouse had two unfinished floors on 1 and the basement and two stark, spare, all-white boxes with massive bluestone tiles for floors and brushed steel stairs. On the 67 Hudson side, there’s an open bathroom, a bedroom and living room – basically one huge ‘80s bachelor pad. Views out of the 50 windows – including the dozen or so from the skybridge — are perfect vignettes of old Tribeca.

At the time — and I think this question still applies — the question was, who will buy it? The realtors then imagined it could be a super-swanky live/work, or the headquarters for a tech company, or a family home. “It could go to a collector,” said Kaptan Unugur, who represented the property originally when he was at Million Dollar Listings. “Like people who collect art, but this is collecting history.”