The One Townhouse Sanford Smith Didn’t Flip

Antiques never stayed long at the Smith townhouse on West 24th Street. A painting of a shipwreck would wash away when the tide brought a discerning collector to the Smith Gallery on Madison Avenue. A metal rabbit, stuck on top of a rusty weathervane, would slowly scan the living room until Sanford Smith made a trade with one of the Americana dealers he knew from the Chelsea Flea. Only a few pieces survived long enough to be considered off the market: a Shaker dining table, useful for feeding three boys; a curved Paul Evans desk where Sanford took calls; and a three-foot-high sculpture of a rooster, which a picker had given as collateral for a loan before he died. Sanford and Patricia Lynch Smith weren’t sentimental; they bought what they thought they could sell at a profit and used the same sense to find the handsome townhouse in Chelsea where they and their sons lived and worked, even after a divorce, for 55 years.

A 19th-century lamp that once hung in a western brothel still hangs in the Smith family home.
Photo: Niall Schroder

Antiques entered the couple’s life early on: Brooklyn-born Sanford met Patricia in college, and they spent their weekends visiting her parents in Connecticut, where they entertained themselves with trips to auctions. On a lark, they started selling what they found at the Chelsea Flea on 26th Street and spending more time in the neighborhood; friends lived on 24th Street in a London Terrace Towers apartment. When a sign went up down the block at No. 453 advertising a rental, the Smiths moved in. Years later, in 1968, the couple bought No. 447 for $65,000 with a plan to split the 1850 building to make space for renters who could help pay off the mortgage. Two floor-through units on the third and fourth floors sat above an owner’s duplex with bedrooms at the garden level and living spaces on the parlor floor.

The Smiths basking on the front stoop with friends.
Photo: Courtesy Smith family

Sanford oversaw the work himself, serving as a general contractor and renovating just enough to make the place livable. As money came in, Patricia’s antiquarian impulses turned toward the house — dingy carpets were pulled up to reveal original boards from the 1850s with hand-forged nails, and the old brick fireplace was cleaned up without much fuss. The couple soon petitioned Landmarks to give the home a citation, even writing the report (“The first owner of this dignified house was Julia Ann Gray, wife of George Gray…”). The plaque installed to mark the building’s spot on the National Register was stolen six weeks later. This was the Chelsea of the 1970s, and the neighborhood was a bit feral — the couple’s son Ian remembers nearly being mugged for his childhood roller skates until the mugger’s girlfriend intervened: “She said, ‘Oh, he’s cute. Don’t do that.’”

Smith used his flair for organizing events to establish an annual fundraiser on 24th Street selling wholesale flowers to benefit the beautification of the block.
Art: Mimi Vang Olson/Photo: Courtesy Ian Lynch Smith

The couple’s businesses blossomed in those years. In 1979, Sanford founded the Fall Antiques Show, one of the first to focus on American pieces, which would run for 20 years and spin off ten other fairs focused on quilts or rare books, photographs or works on paper. Sanford charged sellers for space and buyers for tickets. The cash he pulled in funded a major renovation at the house on 24th Street, during which the family ditched their renters and turned the place into a single-family home. Antiques flowed in and out as the couple waited for the market to improve and the right buyer to wander past. During a home visit in 1984, a reporter from The Christian Science Monitor spotted “Western art, Navajo rugs, a Queen Anne wing chair, 1920s and ’30s architect-designed ‘modern’ hand-painted trunks, Harry Jackson bronzes, Shaker furniture, Grenfell rugs, 19th-century weather vanes, marine paintings, and military miniatures.”

Selling those items became more of a hobby for Sanford as the fairs he ran took off. The money coming in was now substantial enough to start a new collection: real estate. He bought another place on West 24th Street and let it out to renters, then pounced on one of the East Village’s rare surviving synagogues. In the 1990s, now separated from Patricia, he bought a bachelor pad in a converted 1930 West Village garage, then a house in Chelsea to live in with his girlfriend, Jill Bokor, a magazine publisher. (They married in 2004.) “Sandy would buy houses in three minutes,” says Bokor, who watched him make offers after a single walk-through. Like any experienced collector, he knew what he wanted. “Prewar, pre–Civil War if possible,” she tells me. “He cared about certain things, but it was more — he was doing a ka-ching in his mind.” Then there were the vacation houses in the North Fork and the Berkshires and two Upper West Side townhouses (also listed this year).

When Smith died, his portfolio included 166 West 88th Street and 310 West 92nd. Niall Schroder.

When Smith died, his portfolio included 166 West 88th Street and 310 West 92nd. Niall Schroder.

The house at 447 West 24th remained with Patricia, who had an open-door policy letting relatives crash in the mother-in-law apartment on the garden level and hosting her sons and their college friends upstairs. “There was something about the house that was incredibly open,” remembers Ian Smith. Eventually, Patricia set out a guest book simply to keep track of comings and goings.

Smith walking up to his office on 24th Street last year, shortly before he died.
Photo: Courtesy Ian Smith

Sanford and Patricia remained friends until Patricia’s death in 2003. After her death, he ended up working from the house, too, with his staff in the front of the parlor level and his big desk in back.with his staff in the front and his big desk in back. “It felt like a working antiques shop,” says Bokor, whom Sanford tapped to run the firm’s most prestigious fair, Salon Art + Design, which would go on to win sponsorships from luxe fashion houses and furniture brands. It was a clientele perhaps less accustomed to navigating around piles of old bowling pins and typewriters, vintage televisions and sideshow signs. “We weren’t thrilled to invite people,” she says. But executives in slim designer suits and Rolexes would still meet with Sanford, always attired in an old L.L.Bean shirt and a Timex, sitting across from his desk with a statue of a rabbit and one of his grandkids’ Beanie Babies. “It was a mess,” Bokor says. “But it was the kind of mess that was his culture, that was his home.”

Smith behind his Paul Evans desk with a 1944 Reginald Marsh ink wash behind him showing crowds in front of the Coney Island billboards that Smith also collected. One advertised “the World’s Youngest Mother.”
Photo: Courtesy Jill Bokor

When the row went up in the 1850s, the setbacks might have been designed to match what was then known as “Millionaire’s Row” on 23rd Street. The homes faced a line of two-story “Chelsea Cottages” that were built for working families, then razed in the 1920s to build the London Terrace Towers.
Photo: Niall Schroder

Patricia Lynch Smith appreciated the home’s patina and renovated to preserve original floors, moldings, and fireplaces.
Photo: Niall Schroder

Smith built out the spaces for his young family, adding a sandbox in the backyard and, later, this deck off the parlor floor.
Photo: Niall Schroder

Looking toward the living room on the parlor level when the space was used as the office of Sanford L. Smith + Associates.

The living room as it is being marketed, without the clutter of Smith’s business.
Photo: Niall Schroder

The Paul Evans desk where Smith worked surrounded by some of the wares that survived a lifetime of collecting. They went up for auction earlier this year, selling to some of the same dealers Smith had worked with regularly.
Photo: Courtesy Ian Smith