Prince St. Building Sold to Mysterious, History-Obsessed Local

The low-profile owner of two buildings, located at the intersection of Prince Street and the Bowery, has now bought an adjacent walk-up for $5.5 million. Yet it is not known what the buyer’s plans are for the new building, nor the Nolita block where it sits.

As first reported by Pincus Co., and confirmed by Our Town Downtown via a review of city records, 5 Prince St. changed hands from Bowery Land LLC to TTC Investments XI LLC on Aug. 14. The sale was made public on Aug. 22. The building, which is mixed-use, has two residential units and currently spans 3,500 square feet.

TTC Investments is affiliated with Adam Woodward, a fairly enigmatic investor who made a name as a self-styled preservationist roughly a decade ago, while the seller was identified as Amy Kit-Ming Mak. An individual named Walter Edelstein was the official signatory for TTC, however.

Amy Kit-Ming Mak had previously purchased the building from an individual named Anton Mayer for $5.48 million back in 2021, indicating that the building was not sold for a substantial gain this month.

Woodward also purchased 232 and 234 Bowery from Mayer—located next to 5 Prince St.—for a cool $15 million back in 2024. Mayer had bought the properties in 2016 for $12.3 million.

Woodward still controls these properties, meaning that he now has what Pincus described as a “possible assemblage” on the block in the works. An assemblage, at least in the realm of real estate, is the legal combination of multiple smaller tracts into one larger one.

Much of what is publicly identifiable about Adam Woodward comes from a 2014 New York Times profile of him, entitled “In His Basement, the Bowery.” The article, by Sandy Keenan, painted him as a “photo researcher by training”; he described himself to Keenan as “‘on hiatus from actually working,’ although [earning] rental and retail income from the building he lives in.” As his recent property purchases suggest, this may still be the case.

His photo-research subject of choice, as the piece’s headline suggested, was the Bowery itself. The Bowery, of course, is a historic thoroughfare (and associated neighborhood) that abuts the Lower East Side and Chinatown. Woodward was identified as living on Elizabeth Street, which is one block west of the Bowery and runs parallel to it. It is unclear how he acquired the money for such large-scale transactions.

Woodward, Keenan wrote, “has cajoled or insinuated his way into nearly every antebellum building on the Bowery, ahead of the wrecking crews, photographing and salvaging what he finds inside the walls, attics and subbasements of factories, taverns, storefronts, and tenements, many long ago abandoned. He is so quiet and stealthy as he goes about his work that those who know what he’s up to have taken to calling him the Shadow.”

Other articles from the 2010s described Woodward as a preservationist. He made it on to CBS News to that end in 2013, after claiming that he “found evidence that a Manhattan building is the former site of an 18th-century tavern,” namely a fairly mythic one known as the Bull’s Head.

It was, as CBS News explained, “where George Washington is believed to have enjoyed a celebratory drink during the American Revolution.” The Hotel 50 Bowery (located at 50 Bowery) was built on the site not long after, with Woodward’s purported discovery briefly causing a stir around its construction.

He is reportedly married to Llaria Fusina-Woodward, who was listed as an editor of high-end art and design books at Rizzoli, as well as a founding board member of NYC Kids Project. She was also a trustee of the Blue School.

A number of Adam Woodward’s buildings are said to be managed by Building Equity Management. Calls to Building Equity Management by Our Town Downtown were not returned by press time.