Exclusive | Inside a $20M NYC home with an 83-foot rock climbing wall

On a recent fall weekend, the line outside an otherwise quiet stretch of Minetta Lane snaked toward Sixth Avenue. Neighbors, architecture buffs and tourists waited for their turn to step into a Greenwich Village townhouse that feels more like a habitable installation than a conventional home: a six-story compound wrapped around an 83-foot rock-climbing wall.

That house, at 16 Minetta Lane, is now back on the market for $19.97 million — and it seems people are hungry to get a piece of it. 

The property is the work of architect Adam Kushner, who spent more than a decade turning a 19th-century townhouse and rear carriage house into a single, highly theatrical residence — then lived through years of construction with his family.

In 2024, it listed under a different brokerage. The listing is now being marketed by Nicole Gary of Keller Williams NYC, who sold the home to Kushner, which for him was a momentous occasion.

“We moved in more or less on December 22nd, 2012 at 4:30 in the afternoon,” Kushner said. “We have never left the house since that time.” 

Even as he gutted and rebuilt, he added, “we did a lot of demolition. We tore the house apart, and yet we stayed there. We were living through this incredible major renovation.”

For more than a decade, Kushner treated 16 Minetta Lane as both laboratory and family home, transforming a pair of 19th-century structures into one of Greenwich Village’s most idiosyncratic private residences. 

Now, after raising his twins inside the six-story compound — and living through years of construction — he’s preparing to part ways with the home. 

Kushner bought the townhouse and its rear carriage house and then merged them into a single residence defined by reclaimed timbers, a triple-height living room and nine working fireplaces.

The most eye-catching feature is the 83-foot climbing wall that pierces the home from courtyard to rooftop. But he said the home isn’t solely about that amenity.

“I hate to think the whole house experience … comes down to a feature which is unusual,” he said. “That was part of a bigger narrative that I was telling.” 

The wall began as a metaphor: a vertical timeline marking both sides of his family’s history and their stories. 

“The original idea was to take little things from our past that we would grasp on to,” he said, from his grandfather’s eyeglasses to a sign salvaged from his in-laws’ former store on the Lower East Side. Technical limits stopped him from embedding heirlooms, but the wall became a fully engineered climbing system.

“There are easy climbs, hard climbs there’s virtually impossible climbs,” he said, adding that he climbed himself with a few friends last month.

Beyond the spectacle, the home is rooted in its historical layers.

“It builds upon the house’s actual foundations, which go back to 1848,” Kushner said. The property once housed a horseshoeing facility; horses were “dragged through the house into the back to be shoed,” he noted. 

It later became an eight-unit rooming house before famed designer Robert Isabell gutted it in the 1990s.

“He created these double-, triple-height spaces,” Kushner said. “There were floor-to-ceiling windows that one could topple out of.”

Kushner preserved portions of that radical interior but rebuilt most of the structure. 

Today, the main house connects to the four-story carriage house across a covered courtyard, offering a rare two-building configuration. 

“It’s a perfect setting for a mother-daughter or mother-in-law situation,” he said.

The home’s upper floors feature a meditation room with a grass-covered terrace, two secondary bedroom suites, and a fifth-floor primary bedroom with a woodburning fireplace and views stretching to the Empire State Building and Freedom Tower.

“We are the tallest building in the protected district,” he said. “You will have forever views to the south.”

Despite the scale, Kushner describes the home not as imposing — but supportive. 

“It’s nurturing … you really feel good living there. I enjoy it. It’s surrounded, comforting all those things that homes are supposed to do for you,” Kushner said. “It’s not anonymous. It’s not cold. It’s not sterile.“

Still, he said it’s more house than he and his wife now need. 

“We’re empty nesters now,” he said. “It’s a lot of house for two people.”

They plan to relocate full-time to Gardiner, N.Y., where they’re designing what he calls a retirement home, while maintaining a smaller place in the city. 

“I’m born and bred in New York,” he said. “That’s where I’m going to finish out.”

Letting go won’t be easy.

“It’s going to feel terrible,” he admitted. “I really I’m going to be very, very upset.” 

But he sees the sale as another chapter in the house’s long evolution.

 “It’s time for the next person to step in and live their life in it.”