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Chris Pomorski

Manhattan Transfers

Work-Life Balance: California Producer Contracts for Flatiron Loft Listed at $3.5 M.

By Chris Pomorski 3/07 5:08pm

Cast-iron in Flatiron.

On one of many recent frigid days, Prime Manhattan broker Robert Danker had more than wet feet and windburn to complain about. Having scheduled a viewing for a full-floor unit listed for $12.5 million at the tony One Madison, Mr. Danker became victim to last-minute cancellation when a client begged off—citing inclement conditions and confirming the broker’s hunch that his “buyer” was less than serious. Fortunately, Mike Pardee, executive producer at The Mission—a California-based visual effects studio—waited in the wings. Though Mr. Pardee planned to see a more humble unit at 7 East 17th Street, asking $3.5 million and in need of serious work, he arrived that day equipped, Mr. Danker told us, with both enthusiasm and imagination, entering contract the very next day on the live-work space. Read More

Manhattan Transfers

Get on Your Horse! Shipping Magnate Snaps Up $12.49 M. UES Townhouse

By Chris Pomorski 3/06 1:51pm

Cherubs, anyone?

Lou Reed manager, facilitator of albums by the Who and Eric Clapton and breeder of the champion racehorse Zenyatta, Eric Kronfeld, a tough-talking lawyer and record executive, died last spring after a battle with cancer. He passed his last years comfortably, though, in a regal home eminently suited to a man of his prowess in matters both commercial and equestrian.

Sources tells us that the new owner of Mr. Kronfeld’s townhouse at 38 East 68th Street, which just sold at ask for $12.49 million after less than three weeks on the market, is a man whose professional concerns center on shipping and real estate. But he certainly spends like he can afford a polo pony or two. And Francis O’Shea, who held the listing at Leslie J. Garfield & Co., told us with a chuckle that the buyer felt no need of a big mortgage. Read More

The Air Up There

Could More Flexible Air Rights Policies Facilitate the Growth of Affordable Housing?

By Chris Pomorski 3/04 6:00pm

Could air transfers reforms

During the 1970s fiscal crisis, the city acquired significant quantities of property by way of owner abandonment and tax foreclosure, which it used in subsequent decades to subsidize affordable housing development. Virtually none of that land remains available today, however, and as we recently noted, the now-stratospheric cost of privately held land poses myriad obstacles to new affordable housing production, particularly in neighborhoods with good public schools, ready access to transportation and employment centers. Read More

Manhattan Transfers

The Science of Sexy: LA Power Couple Drops $4.95 M. on Chelsea Townhouse

By Chris Pomorski 3/04 12:24pm

353 1

If there is one thing the fashion and interior designer, author, artist, real estate developer and all around composition maven Bradley Bayou understands, it is symmetry. Symmetry, his artist’s statement says, is the one scientifically-proven “timeless evolutionary trait for sexy.” (For the record, the Observer has yet to hear the term “sexy” uttered in the context of lab work.) The trait naturally figured in Mr. Bayou’s 2006 fashion manual The Science of Sexy, and it was no doubt on his mind when he and William Morris Endeavor board member and Hollywood super agent Mark Itkin, went real estate shopping recently in Chelsea. The townhouse they settled on at 353 West 20th Street—for $4.95 million, about a half million less than the $5.5 million ask—does not immediately suggest sexiness. But then, Mr. Bayou is good with makeovers. Read More

This Modern World

Construction at Modern 19 Building Reaches Completion, Even as Minor Identity Crisis Persists

By Chris Pomorski 3/03 4:34pm

A rendering of Modern 19

Have you admired, in passing, Israeli developer Erez Itzhaki‘s luxurious Modern 23 condominium building at 350 West 23rd Street? Do you covet its Daniel Goldner design—its modernist grid of black brick, perforated metal and glass? Are you a fan of organic finishes and flowing spaces? And are you perhaps looking for something similar in lately effervescent Chelsea to rent, or perhaps even to buy? Well, you are in luck. Mr. Itzhaki announced completion today at 138 West 19th Street of Modern 19, which, he told the Observer, will much resemble the earlier construction. But depending on your flexibility on the issue of rent/ownership, it may be luck of a particularly heartbreaking kind. Mr. Itzhaki has not yet decided whether to lease or to sell the six floor-through units in the new boutique building, which he intended originally as a rental. Read More

Smoke Signals

Lights Out? Smokers’ Rights Group Enlisted, Without Success, to Tangle with UWS Condo Building

By Chris Pomorski 3/01 3:29pm

The Vaux

The New York Peace Institute, a group devoted to mediation and conflict resolution, recently received an inquiring message from Audrey Silk, the founder of a non-profit known as NYC C.L.A.S.H.—Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment—regarding an informational meeting for residents of the Vaux Condominium building, on Central Park West. The Peace Institute had been invited—and by all indications planned to attend—the meeting, which had been organized by the building’s condo board, in order to ease potential tensions between residents in support of a proposed smoking ban in the building, and those opposed to it. Read More

Buy the Farm

Actor Armand Assante’s Rural Estate Due for Bankruptcy Auction in May

By Chris Pomorski 2/28 2:54pm

Armand Assante

It is possible to spend decades working in Hollywood, grow wealthy from the proceeds of appearances on stage and screen, and to garner plaudits from televised awards shows without ever becoming a “star,” in the traditional sense of the word. Armand Assante has had such a career. If you passed him on the street, you might know his face, but unless you are a great reader of TV Guide,  you’d probably be unable to place him. A hardworking actor, Mr. Assante has been known to take on five, six, and even seven films in a single year—secondary parts in American Gangster and Judge Dredd, and as the man himself in the 1996 TV movie Gotti. (He assumed a decidedly different titular role in 2007′s When Nietzsche Wept.) It has been a public, prosperous and yet somehow anonymous sort of life, which seems to be how Mr. Assante likes it. But as Nietzsche might have advised him, all good things must come to an end. Read More

Manhattan Transfers

Inside Job: Hot Shot Interior Architect Thomas Juul-Hansen Sells Tribeca Co-op for $2.4 M.

By cpomorski and Chris Pomorski 2/26 3:25pm

Thomas Juul-Hansen (Matz Form)

Were we Seattle-based doctors in the market for a Tribeca co-op, it would probably never occur to us to seek out an available unit inhabited most recently by a renowned architect and interior designer. But now that we think about it, that’s probably not such a bad way to go about things. Whether Linda E. Day conducted her search in quite so calculated a fashion we cannot say with certainty, but whatever the case, she’s just picked up Danish architect Thomas Juul-Hansen‘s old place at 138 Duane Street for $2.4 million, according to city records. Town Residential’s Susan Green and Brett Miles shared the listing.  Read More

Manhattan Transfers

Strength in the Union: Real Estate Power Couple Drops Zeckendorf Towers Condo for $3 M.

By cpomorski and Chris Pomorski 2/25 3:39pm

Kate Vanek

Last year, when CEO of the eminent structural engineering firm Thornton and Tomassetti Thomas Scarangello and his wife Roxanne Donovan—who heads up the real estate PR firm Great Ink—were looking for a new place of their own, they turned to the Upper East Side’s Philip House, for an $8.2 million condo conversion with ample prewar charm. Never far from the scrum of property peddling in their professional lives, the pair entered the action again this week—this time for personal reasons—selling a much more modern combination in Zeckendorf Towers at 1 Irving Place for $3.05 million, according to city records. Read More

Manhattan Transfers

Going, Going, Gone! Former MLB President Trades UES Pad for $5.77 M.

By cpomorski and Chris Pomorski 2/21 2:15pm

In the garden.

The two co-op buildings at 115 East 67th Street and 116 East 68th Street, the New York Times noted in 2011, are “covered with storks, monkeys, pelicans, owls, hounds and a particularly uncuddly set of rabbits,” carved from stone. (The rabbits do indeed seem to have been inspired by Donnie Darko rather than Peter Cottontail.) Built by John D. Rockefeller in 1930, the Milan House—a name the structures share—is connected by an Italianate garden at the buildings’ flanks, and is, the Times continued, “most civilized within,” despite wild exteriors. It was no doubt partially that air of civility that drew Robert A. Dupuy, the one-time COO and president of Major League Baseball, and his wife Edith to the building on 67th Street, where they lived in a duplex on the fifth and sixth floors. But perhaps they have grown tired of that stony menagerie, or maybe they’ve just wearied of New York winters, because the couple has sold the apartment for $5.77 million, according to city records, more than a tuppence short of their $6.75 million ask. Read More