The difference between the actors-Edie Falco, who plays Carmela, and James Gandolfini, who plays Tony-is now about five blocks, since both have recently purchased property in the far West Village.

On March 8, Mr. Gandolfini closed a $1.05 million deal to buy a 1,367-square-foot condo at 99 Jane Street, an 11-story building in the far West Village designed by Fox & Fowle, the architects who built the Condé Nast building at 4 Times Square. The purchase was made just three days before he filed for divorce from his wife, Marcy.

At just about the same time, Edie Falco bought a townhouse at 97 Barrow Street, between Hudson and Greenwich streets, for $2.55 million.

Though Ms. Falco made a bigger investment, the Jane Street condo is just the smallest piece of Mr. Gandolfini's rapidly expanding real-estate empire spanning lower Manhattan, where he has lived most of his adult life, and northern New Jersey, where the actor grew up-though all that might soon have to be divided with his wife.

In January of last year, Mr. Gandolfini bought a historic farmhouse in Chester Township, N.J., for $1.14 million. The four-bedroom home on five acres dates to the early 19th century. "I just like the house," Mr. Gandolfini told the New Jersey paper The Star-Ledger at the time. "My 2-year-old needs to run on grass a little bit." Three months later, the Gandolfinis reportedly moved from an apartment in the Village to a $2 million, three-bedroom loft on Greenwich Street in Tribeca, just a few blocks from the building on West Broadway bought by Michael Imperioli, who plays Tony Soprano's nephew Christopher in the HBO series.

But Mr. Gandolfini seems to have missed the Village. Last July, he made a $300,000 deposit on an 1842 Greek revival brownstone at 138 West 13th Street, with a separate, small 1920's cottage at the back of the lot. The house belonged to Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, and when the deal unraveled, Mr. Gandolfini sued the couple for the deposit money. (The case is still pending, and the house is still on the market with Debbie Korb of Sotheby's International Realty for $3.6 million.)

Late last year, Mr. Gandolfini signed a contract on the Jane Street apartment. The two-bedroom, second-floor apartment has a small but well-appointed kitchen near the entrance, a limestone master bathroom with a Jacuzzi and stall shower, a laundry room, maple floors and walls of east-facing windows in every room.

Ms. Falco's new property seems to be a long-term investment. "She's got a gorgeous house," said one broker who has seen the four-story, neo-Greek-style brick townhouse, built in 1847. The interior has been completely redone, mixing ornate original details (where they could be preserved) with sleek contemporary finishes. The common thread is the wide-planked flooring-homey and old-fashioned-looking where elaborate moldings and archways set the theme, and sleek and comfortable in, for instance, the open kitchen and great room that leads onto a patio.

But a little more than a week after buying the place, Ms. Falco put it up for rent with the Corcoran Group-for $13,500 per month. Bada-bing !

Shelby Bryan's House To Get About $11 Million

Al Gore, you're out of luck. The Upper East Side townhouse of Shelby Bryan, former chief executive of ICG Communications and a huge supporter of the former Vice President, has a buyer who is paying close to $11 million.

Of course, Mr. Gore has found other lavish Manhattan residences in which to be fêted by men with deep pockets. And in fact, Mr. Bryan has not lived in the house, at 134 East 71st Street, since he separated from and then divorced Katherine Bryan, with whom he has two children. He bought the place in 1999 for $7.3 million. In November of 2000, he was ousted by ICG, a Denver-based telecom company that filed for bankruptcy the same month. Mr. Bryan is now dating Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour, and renting an apartment at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street.

Mr. Bryan's former wife, who spent six months redoing the 12-room, six-bedroom place with the help of friend Susan Gutfreund (floral-print upholstery on the living-room walls), signed a deal to sell the house in April. The ladies' handiwork was featured in the February 2001 issue of House Beautiful . In May of 2001, Ms. Bryan put the townhouse on the market for $14 million and, two price discounts later, the house has a signed contract. Sources familiar with the transaction say the buyers intend to close the deal in June.

Brokers were divided about the merits of the house, which is 23 feet wide and right off Lexington Avenue. "It is in exquisite condition and has lovely flow," said Paula Del Nunzio, a townhouse specialist at Brown Harris Stevens who has seen the property

Upper West Side

11 Riverside Drive One-bed, one-bath, 1,000-square-foot co-op. Asking: $765,000. Selling: $755,000. Charges: $891; 42 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: two months.

SHUTTLE-JUMPERS TIRE OF YALE CLUB Let's face it, when buying real estate in New York, rarely do people find themselves moving into a place significantly better than they imagined. But when a couple from Washington, D.C., tired of the accommodations of the convenient yet musty Yale Club across the street from Grand Central-an oasis of old-boy-ness-decided to find a more permanent New York perch, they made an educated decision that paid off. Joanna Simon, a broker with the Fox Residential Group, took them on three shopping ventures. On the third trip, they stumbled into this apartment near 73rd Street-a 1,000-square-foot one-bedroom in need of an elaborate renovation-and knew they had struck Manhattan gold: The apartment has an almost 1,000-square-foot terrace with unobstructed views of the Hudson River. Despite the fact that "the couple was not looking for something this spectacular," according to Ms. Simon, once they saw it, they couldn't turn it down. They will do major renovations, including putting French doors from the apartment onto the terrace. Next decision: why get back on the shuttle south?

Upper East Side

35 Sutton Place Three-bed, three-bath, 2,200-square-foot co-op. Asking: $1.6 million. Selling: $1.43 million. Maintenance: $2,550; 52 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: two weeks.

LET'S ROLL … DOWN THE BLOCK "There are decision-makers and non-decision-makers, and these people were decision-makers," said Julie Friedman of Bellmarc Realty, of the couple that bought this apartment. "I had taken them to see maybe eight or 10 apartments, and as soon as we got in the foyer of this apartment, I knew on the spot that they knew on the spot that they were going to take this apartment." When the recently retired couple, who'd been renting an apartment nearby, saw this sunny three-bedroom co-op with East River views, one said to the other, "Let's do it." Twenty-four hours later, said Ms. Friedman, the contract was signed.

Midtown East

200 East 57th Street Two-bed, two-bath, 1,500-square-foot co-op. Asking: $698,000. Selling: $685,000. Maintenance: $1,820; 50 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: three weeks.

THE CURE FOR CRAMPING Yeah, yeah, yeah. The apartment was in good condition-"a beautiful, traditional look," said Barbara Lee Chase of the Corcoran Group, who sold this co-op with her partner, Rose Grobman. The kitchen was redone and the bathrooms were nice. But let's cut to the chase: "This building is known for its great closet space," said Ms. Chase, who owns an apartment in the building herself. In this apartment, we're talking about four walk-in closets. In fact, in general, the apartment is spacious. "The rooms are very generous," Ms. Chase said. The building, near Third Avenue, is popular among people "relocating from a house and facing the trauma of moving into a New York City apartment." The guy who bought it works in Manhattan but had been living in a house in the country. His thinking: less to have to unload on eBay.

West Village

325 West 11th Street Two-bed, one-bath, 850-square-foot co-op. Asking: $349,000. Selling: $345,000. Maintenance: $695; 50 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: three months.

ENGLISHMEN IN NEW YORK If you spin it right, this apartment sounds like a dream: Between West and Washington streets, the 850-square-foot place is a decent amount of space for under $350,000. Then again, it's on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, it's laid out railroad-style, and only one of the five rooms-a bedroom-doesn't face the building right next-door. "You could see kids' drawings on the neighbor's refrigerator and what kind of shampoo people were using," said Scott Saunders of Bellmarc Realty, who sold the apartment and noticed the privacy issue. But probably the biggest drawback to the place when the broker was trying to sell it was the flighty English sublessee and his frequently visiting uncle, who made showing the apartment difficult. Luckily for Mr. Saunders and the seller-an author living in Arizona-the buyers, a couple from California, were pretty patient about getting in to see the place. And once inside, they were able to overlook the old Chinese food containers strewn everywhere. Cheers!

Bryan House $11 Million Deal

Several times. But Leslie J. Garfield, of Leslie J. Garfield & Co. said, "It's right across the street from a garage, and that's why it sat on the market for so long." The house has a dining room that feeds into a garden in the back. Upstairs, there's a master-bedroom suite that one source said is "incredibly well laid out," with his-and-hers dressing rooms. The house also has a media room and a small gym.

Ms. Bryan's home on the East End's Lily Pond Lane was on the April 2002 cover of House Beautiful -a strategic coup, since it has been reported that she might want to sell that one, too.

But no one is promising anything. Ms. Streisand's penthouse has become known as the apartment that just wouldn't sell. In the many years it's been on the market, Ms. Streisand has had a string of people signing contracts for the place at a wide range of prices, but still has never been able to unload it. The closest she ever came, said a source familiar with the deal, was over a decade ago, when a magazine editor agreed to pay $2.7 million for the place and miraculously made it past the board. But, recalled the broker, Ms. Streisand had not yet purchased another apartment and convinced the editor to cancel the deal.

Since then, however, the co-op board has rejected several potential buyers-most memorably singer Mariah Carey, who offered to pay $8 million for the duplex and the apartment below it in 1999. "I don't know whether they don't like her or what," said one broker. "But after a while, it starts to seem personal."

Brokers also say that, despite the fact that the apartment is 4,100 square feet, has 1,750 square feet of outdoor space and multiple working fireplaces, "it has a lot of things to overcome." One broker who has shown it several times said, "First of all, it's a back apartment, so there is no view. It's also in original condition, and it has a problem with leaks."

Ms. Streisand's apartment has been represented by several brokers over the years, but the listing currently belongs to Carrie Chiang of the Corcoran Group, whose Web site now reflects the apartment's new status as being under contract. The penthouse was last on the market for $4.75 million-quite a drop from the $10 million the place was once asking. If it seems surprising that Ms. Streisand would accept around $4 million, well, it shouldn't. Less than a year ago, it was reported that Ms. Streisand, fed up with the apartment predicament, was considering donating it to charity.

Goldman Guy Next in Line For Ted Ammon's Co-op

For the fourth time since it came on the market in the fall of 2000, slain financier Ted Ammon's apartment at 1125 Fifth Avenue has a buyer.

Sources familiar with the deal say that a Goldman Sachs partner who has been looking for an apartment for several years has agreed to pay $10 million for the four-bedroom co-op.

Brokers say that the previous buyer, Richard Schaps, chief executive of billboard firm Van Wagner Communications-who had also offered $10 million-was recently rejected by the co-op board for "unspecified reasons." Mr. Schaps is the third applicant to be rejected by the board, which Ammon had filed suit against before he was found dead in his Hamptons home last October.

Brokers said that should the board continue to reject applicants, the price tag would only go up, as it's still relatively low for a full-floor, 5,500-square-foot, 10th-floor residence near East 92nd Street.

UPPER WEST SIDE

2109 Broadway (the Ansonia) Three-bed, two-bath, 2,300-square-foot condo. Asking: $1.45 million. Selling: $1.395 million. Charges: $1,320. Taxes: $121. Time on the market: two months.

CHOREOGRAPHER PULLS OFF BIG MOVE Where else should a City Opera choreographer live but at the Ansonia? At least that's what former City Opera soprano Joanna Simon thought when an old colleague called her looking for a new home. And apparently, Ansonia apartments are not that hard to come by-they're just harder to afford. Ms. Simon, now a broker with the Fox Residential Group, took the choreographer to look at a three-bedroom apartment in the fabled building, near 77th Street; it had just been renovated and has huge windows with balconies off them. The choreographer was able to see it all coming together marvelously and forked over the dough.

UPPER EAST SIDE

165 East 72nd Street Three-bed, three-bath, 1,600-square foot co-op. Asking: $1.15 million. Selling: $1.1 million. Maintenance: $2,096; 44 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: Two months.

SO LONG, NEIGHBOR; HELLO, THREE BEDROOMS If some folks want to ship out to the Hamptons permanently, well, that just leaves more room for the rest of us. Take the couple in their 40's who had grown claustrophobic in their apartment a few floors below this one and found their prayers answered when this place went on the market after the owners fled to the East End. "Everybody who lives here says they wouldn't want to live anywhere else," said Norma Hirsch, a broker at Insignia Douglas Elliman, of the residents of this postwar co-op building on the corner of Third Avenue, which has a gym, a garage and a doorman. But the stroke of luck didn't stop the buyers from negotiating with the newly anti-city sellers; they got $50,000 knocked off of the asking price.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

2 Horatio Street One-bed, one-bath, 800-square-foot co-op. Asking: $435,000. Selling: $438,000. Maintenance: $935.51; 52 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: three days.

90 NEW YORKERS FOR EVERY ONE-BEDROOM Anthony Miller, a broker at Bellmarc Realty, knew that this quiet one-bedroom apartment with a courtyard exposure near Hudson Street was slightly underpriced when he put it on the market for $435,000 in the beginning of January. But his seller needed a quick sale, and the market had been slow. He figured the low price would speed things up. He had no idea just how much. "There were 90 people at our first open house," he said. "I didn't know whether to cry or be happy or call the police." It got all the more chaotic when the doorman demanded that Mr. Miller personally escort each potential buyer from the lobby. "So back and forth I went … at one point, there were 37 people backed up in the lobby," he said. A successful architect who'd shown up early decided he'd like to buy the place. He thought there might be competition, so when he called that night, he made an offer slightly over the asking price. Turns out he had it figured perfectly: He just got the keys.

PARK SLOPE

53 Montgomery Place Three-bed, two-bath, 1,400-square-foot co-op. Asking: $629,000. Selling: $629,000. Maintenance: $740; 50 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: one week.

WILLY LOMAN AT THE DOOR! Earlier this year, a couple of successful Manhattan attorneys living in Brooklyn decided to hightail it to sunny California. When they put this three-bedroom apartment dripping with prewar detail (tin ceilings, ornate decorative fireplace, stained-glass windows, etc.) on the market for $629,000, an insurance salesman came knocking at their door. This being one of the nicest blocks in Park Slope, their visitor wasn't selling anything-he wanted to buy the place as a new home for his wife, a teacher, and their two daughters. According to Patricia Neinast of the Corcoran Group, who brokered the sale, "They were moving from a very comparable apartment on Prospect Park West." But the girls had friends in the neighborhood, plus the apartment comes with a rear garden and a painting studio for Mom in the basement-a poster for home insurance.

THE HARLEM HUSTLE

Last October, Sean Holl- ingsworth, a stage producer, and Donald Robinson, an accountant, thought they had sealed a deal to buy a house at 59 West 119th Street. The pair had found two tenants to rent out part of the house and were planning their holiday-slash-housewarming party for December when they got the bad news: Their seller had signed a contract with another buyer, and the other buyer now had the keys. Their security deposit was returned to them, but their dream house was lost.

Filled with guilt, their broker, Glenn Rice of Willie Kathryn Suggs Real Estate Inc., "took them around everywhere" looking for a replacement house.

Mr. Rice said many Harlem buyers-and there has been a stampede of them-are intent on staying in West Side neighborhoods like Mount Morris Park, near Lenox Avenue and Central Park North, and Morningside Heights and Hamilton Heights, near and north of Columbia University. But this couple had only one sticking point: "I really wanted mahogany moldings, and most of the stuff we saw was oak," explained Mr. Robinson.

Earlier this month, they ended up buying an 18-foot-wide townhouse at 29 East 126th Street for a little over $460,000. "I really liked the configuration," said Mr. Robinson.

The building has its share of problems, but this time the buyers are aware of them. "The ground floor was being used as a restaurant at one time," explained Mr. Rice. "To have a little club or restaurant going on where it shouldn't be … is kind of a Harlem thing."

What's more, the building is still listed with the Department of Finance as a "single-room-occupancy hotel," or boardinghouse-something that will take a little money and a lot of paperwork to fix.

But the sense of history about this place got the couple interested. "The [front] doors are 10 feet tall," said Mr. Rice. "The ceiling height on the parlor floor is 13 feet; there are mirrors … and enormous mahogany details throughout the house: moldings, pocket shutters."

Plans are for the couple to occupy the two floors attached to a garden, with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a large kitchen and a separate dining room.

In the end, they're happier starting over-their would-be home on the West Side was already renovated-even if it means spending a few weeks sleeping in Mr. Robinson's office.

"We'll get exactly what we wanted now," he said.

for her number, she may just say, as she fiddles with her hair and dives back

into her martini glass, "Have your shrink call my shrink."

By then, eligible New Yorkers in therapy-and, let's face it, even

Tara Reid is reportedly in analysis over a guy-can hire licensed psychoanalysts

as the agents of their sex lives. Some New York doctors have created a new

mating game: It's called TheraDate, it costs $2,000 to play, and it's about as

sexy as its name implies-in other words, it's a kind of psycho- shidduch .

Said Dr. Frederick B. Levenson, the 56-year-old Greenwich Village

psychoanalyst behind TheraDate: "Therapists are certainly more qualified to

match people up than any other kind of dating service."

Here's TheraDate's credo: "We stack the deck in your favor-like

no one ever has-to help you find the right life partner." And here's the

function TheraDate performs: Your shrink reveals the cold, ugly truth about you

to other shrinks ( aaaugh! ), and the

patient whose issues and neuroses best match yours gets your number. TheraDate

urges you to give it three dates and-this part sounds like it violates several

federal antitrust laws-you are told to discuss the arranged relationship in

therapy.

"Eighty years of research, information from your therapist-and

your prospective partner's-and a team of experienced psychotherapists" are

supposed to bring you happiness. If you play by the rules.

Which brings us to the first rule of TheraDate: If you're not in

therapy, you're disqualified-not only because there is no doctor to vouch for

you, but also because the therapists making the rules think you're probably not

ready to meet your match.

"By definition, people in therapy are interested in their own

behavior and how that behavior impacts other people," said Dr. Levenson, author

of The Anti-Cancer Marriage: Living

Longer Through Loving . "There is more depth in somebody who is willing to

look into themselves, and whether we offend people or not, we consider people

in therapy smarter than the general public." Specifically, you have to have at

least two months of analysis under your belt within the last two years.

Tucked into an oversize brown leather chair in his cozy basement

office on East 11th Street, Dr. Levenson said he decided to get involved in the

personal lives of his patients after rejecting the idea for 25 years. "The

women say, 'The guy is totally unaware of his feelings, he doesn't know how to

communicate, he keeps to himself, he doesn't treat me properly,'" he said. "And

the male perspective is 'She's crazy' and 'Money is all they care about' …. And

they ask me, 'Where can I meet someone decent?'"

He said that he used to reply, "Well, where do you think you can meet someone decent?"

And typically, he said, his female clients would date bad boy after bad boy and

his male clients went in pursuit of arm candy.

But on March 18, Dr. Levenson and three other Manhattan

mental-health professionals began sending information about TheraDate to 38,000

New York therapists, asking them to present the idea "in session" with any

appropriate clients. They did another mailing to 20,000 therapists in Los

Angeles. They also launched their Web site, www.theradate.com, and began

running small ads in New York

magazine, Time Out New York and Los Angeles magazine.

In two weeks, the Web site received 5,000 hits, mostly from the

tristate area, and over 100 people registered in order to receive more

information, including the 10-page survey with which Mr. Levenson and a

committee of licensed or certified psychologists, psychiatrists, social

workers, psychoanalysts and counselors will evaluate daters. So far, 20

professionals have signed on to help make matches.

For a recommended fee of one regular therapy session (an average

of $150 in Manhattan), your therapist will present you as Bachelor or

Bachelorette No. 1 in the 10-page survey, which is expected to take your doctor

45 minutes to fill out. Here is how you are being evaluated: What are your

defense mechanisms? What are your personality factors? Are you argumentative?

Are you dominant or submissive? What was your family environment like? Where do

you fall in the birth order? How is your relationship with your mother and your

father?

Having your doctor create your profile is supposed to skirt what

the TheraDate Web site calls the "efficient faking" that a client, left to his

or her own resources, resorts to when courting or being courted. "We want the

therapist to provide much more objective information than the client could

give," said Dr. Levenson. "These are paid professionals dedicated to getting to

know the patient better than the patient knows themselves."

The completed form will be sent to TheraDate's headquarters in

Fair Lawn, N.J., where Dr. Levenson is on the faculty of the New Jersey Center

of Modern Psychoanalysis. There, professionals go through the forms looking for

similar educational backgrounds, religions, defense mechanisms, nervous

tics-even sensitivities to auditory, olfactory and tactile sensations.

"Similarity throughout the literature promotes compatibility," said Dr.

Levenson. "Opposites attracting is a statistical myth."

Then clients will be given the first names and contact

information for their potential dates.

"We are going to call them up and tell Bob about Mary and Mary

about Bob, and give phone numbers and let them call each other," said Dr.

Levenson. So clients don't abuse the program, they are allowed only eight

matches a year. "We are not a casual dating service," Dr. Levenson said. "If

you want a casual dating service, please don't bother with us."

The idea of adding a new dimension to the doctor-patient

relationship hinges on the release form TheraDate clients have to sign before

their doctors will take the first step. But plenty of New York City therapists

think more consideration should go into it. "I don't think that matchmaker is

an appropriate role for a therapist," said Avodah K. Offit, a Manhattan couples

and sex therapist and author of The

Sexual Self: How Character Shapes Sexual Relationships . "We don't know how

different people are outside the office."

For many professionals, that's the whole ball game. Dr. James

Williams, a Park Avenue psychoanalyst said filling out a TheraDate form would

be a "no-no" because it would "cloud the transference" between patient and therapist-the

fantasy relationship created between two people who know each other only inside

a small office where they are totally isolated from the rest of the world. "The

idea is to keep the analyst-patient relationship as pure as possible," said Dr.

Williams.

Jane Greer, a couples therapist in midtown and author of How Could You Do This to Me: Learning to

Trust After Betrayal , said, "The

way you see yourself and how your therapist sees you can be very different."

And organizing a patient's personal life, she said, "is contrary to the notion

of therapy, which is teaching patients how to take care of themselves."

Dr. Offit did admit, however, to once having the impulse to set

up two patients. "I thought they were just wonderful for each other," she said.

"They were in the same profession and they seemed to have similar attitudes,

and they were the right age for each other and they were both good-looking. As

it happened, they met each other apart from my intervention, and it was a

disaster."

Dr. Greer actually did put two of her patients together. "They

were both going through a divorce, and they were both saying how isolated they

felt," she said. "I didn't know if they were going to be suitable for each

other or would find each other attractive, but I said, 'I'll give you each

other's numbers and see what happens.' They became the best of friends; it

could have been something else if they had an attraction." They didn't.

And this is where most critics skewer TheraDate. "Before you go

out with a guy, you just need to know if he's cute, if you like him-you don't

have to know that he had a bad relationship with his father," said Ellen Fine,

co-author of The Rules . "They are

playing God on some level …. There is no way to tell if there's a spark …. If

you have nothing else to do, try it-something is better than nothing-but … I

don't love it."

But Judith Kahn, a 44-year-old fund-raiser who lives on the Upper

West Side and works for the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services,

said a man in therapy is attractive to her. "It would indicate they are open to

the idea of working on themselves, and you would hope that in the relationship,

you wouldn't have to convince them that therapy could be a helpful thing in

overcoming hurdles."

Still, she wouldn't trade romance for it. "It's not based on

likes, dislikes or habits. I think it's about chemistry and a certain type of

magic."

Finding Mr. Right, she said, "is a crapshoot."

Then again, according to Freud, "Self-love or narcissism is the

only possibility for love that most people have."

investor Peter Knobel sold his renovated mansion at 20 East 73rd Street for $17

million. The property is spectacular-a 22-foot-wide building located on a prime

block between Fifth and Madison avenues. And Mr. Knobel invested $7 million,

putting in a wine cellar and basement basketball court. But when he got such a

high price-and so quickly: it was on the market for seven weeks-those who track

Manhattan's real-estate market were shocked.

It was the first time an

uptown townhouse had sold for more than $15millionsince 1999,accordingto

year-end 2001 and early 2002 market reports, and it was the first sale over $15

million to close in 2002.

While brokers and market

analysts insist that Manhattan real-estatepriceshave made an almost complete recovery in the past few

months, they agree there is one segment yet to rebound: Properties at the

tippy-top of the market, with asking prices over $10 million, are not selling.

"The mentality is not quite there for trophyproperties," said

Kirk Henckels, director of Stribling & Associate's private brokerage

division, and the author of Stribling's "Luxury Market Report," released in

March. "You wonder if high-end buyers don't all go to the same cocktail party

and decide together whether they are going to buy. They act en masse."

There are only about a dozen apartments with extravagant asking

prices of over $10 million officially on the market, including the British government's

apartment at 4 East 66th Street, for $22 million; a condo at 515 Park Avenue,

for $23 million; hotelier Ian Schrager's co-op at the Majestic, 115 Central

Park West, for $23 million; a 15-room apartment at 640 Park Avenue, for $18

million; Libbet Johnson's condos on the 50th and 51st floors of Trump

International Hotel and Tower, 1 Central Park West, for as much as $41 million;

a 10-room co-op at the Pierre, 795 Fifth Avenue, for $15.5 million; a 14-room

co-op at 927 Fifth Avenue, for $13.7 million; and some condos at the AOL Time

Warner building under construction on Columbus Circle. "The pickings are slim,"

said one broker. "If people aren't moving, it's because there is not a lot on

the market."

The high-end market doldrums are a brush-off to owners who would

sell their premier properties if they felt the market was ready for them. "I'm

representing two Park Avenue apartments for over $12 million, and although I've

gotten a few calls from people wanting to see them, we took them off the market

because the market wasn't warranting the prices," said Michele Kleier,

president of Gumley Haft Kleier. "They are great apartments and they're still

on my Web site, so I assume if there was somebody out there, I would be getting

calls."

In some cases, real-estate

watchers say, the market isn't the problem. "The reason these apartments aren't

all selling is that, for the most part, they are all way overpriced," said

Clark Halstead, chairman and founder of Halstead Property, which is owned by

Terra Holdings, the company that also owns Brown Harris Stevens. "Whereas the

broader market has recovered with unbelievable vigor, this part of the market

is still facing value-conscious reality decisions. It will eventually recover,

because some of the people who are selling these things will decide they need

to sell and adjust their prices."

Added another broker: "I think at one point there was no such

thing as overpriced; now it has re-entered the vocabulary."

Most real-estate analysts attribute the turnaround in the market

for one variety of trophy property-the Manhattan townhouse-to prices being

dropped. After a dim 2001, in which, according to the "Year End 2001 Corcoran

Report," there were two-thirds fewer sales than in 2000, this year has started

off well, including Mr. Knobel's sale.

According to Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel Inc., a

real-estate appraisal firm, market normalcy is slowly trickling upward. "What

happened is that the recovery has been starting at the entry level and then

working its way up," he said. "You really had the market start over in the

fall."

"The high-end market was the last to go down and will be the last

to recover," said Hall Willkie, president of the 152-broker realtor Brown

Harris Stevens. "Starting in January, properties priced up to $3 million came

back gangbusters. There was a lot of pent-up demand. In January, all the sales

were under $5 million, in February it got up to $7 million, in March there were

a handful of sales for over $10 million."

"Showing activity on these kinds of properties has increased

recently," said Mr. Henckels, referring to the number of prospective buyers

making appointments to tour high-end properties. "We haven't seen a lot of

bidding yet, but I expect it will increase soon."

For that, brokers thank Alan Greenspan. Mr. Henckels said

something clicked in mid-January after the Federal Reserve Bank chairman

announced that the economy seemed to be improving. "The confidence just seemed

to float up," he said. The question is, 'just how high will that confidence

float?'

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS

790 Riverside Drive

Two-bed, two-bath, 1,500-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $490,000. Selling: $490,000.

Charges: $810; 45 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: one day.

WHICH COMES FIRST: THE CO-OP OR THE RING?

A year ago, a 34-year-old lawyer and real-estate junkie who had been living in

a basement apartment in the West Village started thinking about marrying his

30-year-old girlfriend. So he started looking for rings and apartments. The

girlfriend, a former punk rocker who now works for a children's television

show, made it clear that moving to Brooklyn was not an option. "According to

her, crossing a bridge was never going to be part of the equation," said the

lawyer. Their first choice was the Village-East or West-"but I think it quickly

became apparent that we weren't going to find what we wanted in either

neighborhood absent another half-million dollars," said the lawyer. So they

totally changed tracks and ended up touring an apartment near West 157th

Street. It was too dark, but they resolved on checking out other apartments in

the building. Two months later, one came on the market for $445,000, and they

came close to making an offer-but the lawyer's girlfriend wanted the ring

first. She still didn't have anything on her finger when yet another apartment

in the building came and went. Finally, over the summer, he popped the

question-but, of course, there were no available apartments in the building

then. They had to wait a few months more before they could make an offer of

$445,000 on this apartment-but with interest in the building rising, they ended

up paying $45,000 more than that.

UPPER WEST SIDE

80 Central Park West

One-bed, one-and-a-half-bath,

875-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $699,000. Selling: $660,000.

Charges: $898; 50 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: two months.

GETTING A LARGER PAD THE HARD WAY It

wasn't only because Amy Arpadi is a broker at the Corcoran Group that she was

forced to play the real-estate market immediately after Sept. 11. A week

earlier, after an elderlyneighbor passed away, she had bought a second, larger

apartment in this building near West 68th Street, where she's lived for the

last 12 years. "I just had an opportunity, and I had to grab it," Ms. Arpadi

said. "But my timing was unfortunate." She couldn't afford to hold onto her old

place, so she put it on the market for $750,000-a price an appraiser had

recommended prior to Sept. 11. Ms. Arpadi held open houses, but nobody came.

Eventually she dropped the price to $699,000, and two of her neighbors got into

a bidding war. But even with their competitive bidding, the place sold for

$40,000 less than the reduced asking price.

UPPER EAST SIDE

879 Fifth Avenue

Two-bed, two-bath, 1,400-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $1.295 million. Selling: $1.250 million.

Charges: $1,625; 50 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: six weeks.

THERE

ARE TWO MORE DOCTORS IN THE HOUSE When a couple in their early 60's, both

doctors, decided to purchase a second home in New York City, they clearly did

their homework. How else could they have ended up with a Fifth Avenue address

for under $1.5 million on the corner of 68th Street, smack in the middle of the

city's Gold Coast? This white-glove building has lots of services, including a

roof deck overlooking Fifth Avenue, an exercise room and a tailor valet who

will come to your apartment and pin your clothing. The only catch is that the

apartment was in "estate condition," with an antiquated kitchen and bathrooms.

"It needs to be completely redone," said Dianne Van Laer, a broker with

Bellmarc Realty. And although the apartment does sport leafy views, they're of

the sycamore trees in the interior garden rather than Central Park across the

street.

WEST VILLAGE

299 West 12th Street

Two-bed, two-bath, 1,400-square-foot condo.

Asking: $1.39 million. Selling: $1.2 million.

Charges: $915. Taxes: $289.

Time on the market: six months.

A

WALL-TO-WALL DEAL Demand for apartments in this prewar doorman building on 12th

Street and Hudson Street, one of five Bing and Bing condos in Greenwich

Village, is usually very high, and it's out of character for an apartment here

to sit on the market. But according to Lew Lydiard of Charles H. Greenthal

& Co., this place was a difficult sell because the retired lawyer selling

it (who had once worked on the Pentagon Papers lawsuit) had knocked down a wall

and taken out the second bedroom. Although the second bedroom could easily have

been re-created, Mr. Lydiard said that many perspective buyers had trouble

envisioning it. Eventually, a woman who was returning to the Village after a

few years in Washington, D.C., and had always pictured herself living in this

1931 building made a deal. Mr. Lydiard said she is in the process of putting up

a wall.

SOUTHAMPTON

So Long, Linden: East

End Estate Split for $18 Million

None of the 16.4 acres of Linden, an estate located on

Ox Pasture Road near Halsey Neck Lane in Southampton, touch the water. Not one

of the seven bedrooms of the house overlooks the Atlantic. In fact, the place

is a good 20-minute walk away. But two buyers paid a combined $18 million for

the place over the last few months, partly, according to local broker John

Golden of Sotheby's International Realty, because "it's absolutely beautiful."

For just under $9 million, one buyer grabbed nine acres

of the estate, including the main house, the 60-foot pool and the carriage barn

with a two-bedroom apartment on its second floor. The other buyer paid slightly

more for the Victorian guest house and a total of 7.25 acres.

"It surprises me a little that one person didn't buy

it" whole, said Peter Turino of Dunemere Associates Real Estate, who put the

estate on the market two years ago for $25 million, but subsequently carved it

into three parcels after failing to find a buyer. "But maintenance and upkeep

on that estate is overwhelming-even for very rich people. This isn't the kind

of place that needs just one full-time caretaker to maintain. It needs at least

four."

Not to mention that the main house-a three-story,

17,000-square-foot affair with an entrance foyer with powder room and

gentleman's half-bath, lavish living rooms with fireplaces for entertaining, a

solarium, seven bedrooms (some with fireplaces and balconies and all with their

own bathrooms) and a staff wing-needs a lot of renovation. "It is a very big

job," said Mr. Turino. "And it will cost millions of dollars."

Still, there's a sense that with the dual sales, the

East End is losing one of its finest properties. Linden, as built by Grosvenor

Atterbury and landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1915, will be no more. It

went up for sale just a few months after the death of its last owner, Lloyd H.

Smith, a conservative Houston oilman and a

founding director of The National Review ,

who bought the property in 1953 from the original owner, Rufus

Patterson, a Cincinnati manufacturer. Patterson commissioned Atterbury, who

designed the Parish Art Museum and the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum

of Art,andOlmsted, wholandscaped Central Park. The property included several

manicured lawns, cuttinggardens, fruit orchards and allées . Ms. Smith called the estate Lenoir after his wife, but Mr.

Smith changed the name to Linden, after the tall trees that dotted the

property.

Now the place is in two pieces: "big" and "bigger."

But in a genuine "safe room"-as these rare but very real top--secret Manhattan bunkers are called by security experts, who have been building them for rich, high-profile clients on and around Fifth Avenue for several years-the plot is supposed to go something like this: If someone breaks in, the owner retreats to a room no larger than 12 feet by 12 feet, reinforced with steel and bulletproof, with a magnetically locking door that seals itself with 1,800 pounds of pressure.

Inside, there's an independent phone line, a back-up generator, an "oxygen scrubber" to replenish the air supply, as many as 16 closed-circuit television screens connected to hidden cameras outside and inside the home, and a computer with a kind of joy stick with which to lock and unlock doors throughout the house so that the perp is the one who finds himself trapped.

Security executives who are confidentially installing safe rooms in some of Manhattan's most expensive residences say their clients pay a lot of money to feel superior to their wildest anxieties and darkest fears: burglars, stalkers, even kidnappers. "It's a very serious room," said Karl Alizade, president of City Safe Inc., a Farmington, N.J., company that has designed and installed several safe rooms in the city. "It's a command center and an attack room-it's not a hideout."

To sell tickets to the Hollywood version, however, screenwriter David Koepp said he had to take some liberties and make hay off the wealthy, neurotic Manhattanite. "I made up the term 'panic room' …. Safe Room didn't sound like a compelling thriller," he said. "If they're safe," he said of the movie's protagonists, "why should I go?"

Not long after reading some accounts of safe rooms in California, Mr. Koepp, who also wrote the screenplays for Jurassic Park and the upcoming Spider-Man , moved into an Upper West Side brownstone with his family. "We were remodeling, and I spent so much time there and with the infrastructure of the house," he said. "Four stories of narrow house seemed like a great setting for a thriller."

When he finished a script and it had gone out to several studios, he said, "I started hearing a lot from Hollywood types-things like, 'Oh, so-and-so has a safe room; this person has one,'" he said. But he wouldn't name names. "You don't want to advertise your panic room-it's like a bomb shelter."

Mr. Koepp added, "Think about how paranoid you have to be to have one of these."

Bob Leonard, the owner of Detective Store International on Christopher Street and a security specialist who worked Liza Minnelli's wedding, said his clients "have a reason to be nervous. They have pictures on the walls that cost a million dollars, rings in their drawers that cost another million, and they usually can't fight worth a damn." He describes the couples that come to him as "40-year-old yuppies." They live in townhouses and fancy apartment buildings on or near Fifth Avenue. If they aren't rolling in Wall Street dough, they've inherited millions. Some feel they are kidnapping targets, and they come to Mr. Leonard asking for a way to protect themselves in their homes. If they'll spend the money, Mr. Leonard suggests they install a safe room. "If you had millions and millions of dollars and are living in Manhattan," he said, "why wouldn't you?"

Mr. Alizade, whose safe rooms start at $400,000, said, "It isn't even celebrities that we build this type of room for. This is for the super-rich and heads of major corporations; it's a whole different level. This is for people who have to deal with the threat of kidnapping and extortion."

Anne Snee, the head of the townhouse division of the Corcoran Group, knows of two safe rooms in Manhattan. "They are for a very specialized segment of the market," she said. "It's mainly captains of industry who perhaps have dealings that are, shall I say, different than anyone else's." One of the safe rooms, said Ms. Snee, "was a separate room constructed so that nobody would find it; it was literally hidden in the wall. You would think it would be in the basement-and this particular basement was reinforced-but the safe room was on the top floor. It wasn't huge and it wasn't finished when I saw it, but you could tell it was going to be state-of-the-art."

A similar type of security-control room is being planned by a developer who just signed a $5 million contract to buy a town house at 129 East 73rd Street, said broker Richard Steinberg of Ashforth Warburg Associates. After renovations, some of the features that will be controlled from a secret basement room will be "hidden cameras throughout the house and wiring so that you can hear what is going on in every room."

The safe room is the cr

Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer , edited by Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery. Rowman & Littlefield, 320 pages, $24.95 (paperback), $69 (cloth).

Every Tuesday night during my senior year at college, about 10 people would gather in my living room. My housemates Peter and Sarah fought over who got to sit in the pale orange chair with its own footstool in the corner. Jamie, another housemate, always claimed the right side of the oversized amber couch, while Peter's friends Andy and Danielle tucked themselves into the other side. Sam sat on the love seat on the right wall, and Kim, our resident Alaskan, was usually content on the floor.

By 7:50 p.m., everyone was assembled. Chitchat and joke-telling ensued, until the first guitar chords of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme song began–then we sat in reverential silence. Phones went unanswered. If an uninitiated guest dared to make a comment–any comment–before a commercial break, they were quickly shushed by the group at large and could expect dirty looks from Jamie for the rest of the night.

Make no mistake: This was not the kind of gathering familiar to college kids across the country, a group assembled to ridicule Felicity or Dawson's Creek or Beverly Hills 90210 , shows that were supposed to depict some facet of our lives and failed pathetically. Buffy was different. Buffy was television to be taken seriously, television that functioned as literary text replete with rhetorical figures, symbolism, foreshadowing, metaphor. And despite the fact that it was about a skinny blonde with superhuman powers, it was television in which we could actually see our own struggles and issues reflected back at us.

The show takes literally the old adage "High school is hell": Buffy battles her teenage problems–represented in the show as vampires and monsters–with satisfying kick-boxing moves and a bag full of crossbows and axes. But there's more to it than action-packed allegory. Buffy presents a rich and complicated emotional world that allows viewers, as creator Joss Whedon has remarked, "to bring [their] own context." So Peter watched Buffy struggle with her identity as a "slayer" in the same way that he struggled with his identity as a homosexual. Sarah saw herself in Faith (another "slayer")–both doing their best to balance the business of being a tough, independent girl with the need for community.

Buffy seemed to beg us to make use of the analytical tools we'd been handed in classes like "Language of Film" and "World of Cinema." For starters, Buffy is a neat inversion of the screaming, scantily clad blonde who's usually the first to die in horror films. And the show takes risks with the medium of television–there's a musical episode and an episode, "Hush," in which not one of the characters speaks for half an hour.

Professors of popular-media studies have long been aware that Buffy is not a typical teen drama. They've been reading enthusiastic undergrad essays on the brilliance of the show for years now (Peter wrote one in 1998 called "Strength & Suffering: The Trials of Buffy the Vampire Slayer"). And those same professors, often turned on to "the Buffyverse" by their students, have published their own essays on Buffy in academic journals. One of the earliest appeared in the Journal of Popular Film and Television in 1999, and the author, Rhonda Wilcox, went on to co-found a Web site called Slayage: The Online International Journal for Buffy Studies. But no academic books have been published on the subject until now–and suddenly we have two collections of scholarly essays: Reading the Vampire Slayer , edited by Roz Kaveney, and Fighting the Forces , edited by Ms. Wilcox and her Slayage co-editor, David Lavery. A third book, Red Noise: Critical Writing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer , is due out later this year.

All Buffy books are not created equal. I suggest that anyone interested in delving into the issues raised by the show (including what constitutes feminism, how we define "the other," and whether the world can be reduced with Manichaean simplicity to the battle between good and evil) should invest in Fighting the Forces .

The 12 essays in Reading the Vampire Slayer were assembled in less than a year, after Ms. Kaveney learned that she had missed the deadline for contributions to Ms. Wilcox and Mr. Lavery's book. There are a few good essays in Reading the Vampire Slayer , but too many left me with a "so what?" feeling. In "Entropy as Demon: Buffy in Southern California," Boyd Tonkin argues that the constant threat of vampires and monsters in the show, while clearly representative of teenage problems, also reflects the constant threat of living in earthquake-and-drought-prone Southern California. Not a stunning revelation. Dave West, in his essay enticingly titled "Concentrate on the Kicking Movie: Buffy and East Asian Cinema," decides in the end that the fight scenes in Buffy have little in common with East Asian cinema. Who cares? An essay that discusses humor in the show concludes: "Buffy reaches greater depths of feeling and insight than most books, shows or movies of the genre because it isn't afraid to laugh." Again, isn't there more to it than that?

The analysis in Fighting the Forces is deeper; the essays come at the show from a better variety of perspectives (race, religion, psychoanalysis, gender, cultural history); and the book has a broader–if more academic–appeal. In "Sometimes You Need a Story: American Christianity, Vampires and Buffy ," Gregory Erickson explains that "Behind the witty dialogue and the engaging characters … the show occupies a space between belief and disbelief, between an absolute morality and nihilism"–the same space, says Mr. Erickson, where most Americans slot their own personal-belief systems. Elyce Rae Helford's essay, "My Emotions Give Me Power: The Containment of Girls' Anger in Buffy," reads like a women's studies class and a "Reading Television" seminar rolled into one. She argues that the way Buffy uses humor–a witty pun delivered just before she drives the stake through the vampire's heart, etc.–allows her to be both tough and feminine at the same time. Ms. Helford writes, "Buffy rejects the message that anger is entirely inappropriate for nice, middle class white girls. Of course, not just any display of anger will do. Over the course of the first four seasons, we learn that 'proper' display means, above all, to enact anger in a contained manner through the employment of wit and humor." Now we're getting somewhere. Another essay borrows from Freudian and Jungian theory to analyze the dream sequences in Buffy –a little crazy, but fun.

I confess I was never as drawn to Buffy as my friends were. Our senior year of college coincided with the third season of the show, and the story arc centered around Buffy's emotionally grueling relationship with Angel, her vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend. Each episode was tearful and gut-wrenching–think Romeo and Juliet , every week–and while my friends watched in silent rapture, I sometimes fought the urge to roll my eyes. But having read these books, I called up Peter and asked to borrow tapes of the first few seasons from his complete collection. Buffy , I've learned, stands up nicely to close reading; it's big enough to absorb any amount of academic theorizing.

But who will actually read scholarly essays on Buffy ? More people than you think. Peter and Jamie, I know; and Daniel, Andy ….

Deborah Netburn is a reporter at The Observer.

Four years after buying a two-acre spread north of Montauk Highway in East Hampton for $950,000, Mr. Bradley recently paid $1.35 million for the 2.77-acre place next-door.

"The property next to his became available, and he just snatched it up," said Kevin Tedesco, manager of CBS News communications, about Mr. Bradley's purchase of 8 St. Regis Court, on a tiny street that leads directly down to the Sag Harbor Bay and near land that used to belong to a summer camp.

While it doubles Mr. Bradley's privacy buffer, the acquisition is also good news for neighbors, who say Mr. Bradley brings some credibility to this northwest part of East Hampton. The locals include Donna Karan, Alec Baldwin and Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, who paid $2.7 million for a house nearby on Hedges Banks Drive, also in 1998.

Bidding-Bing, Bidding-Boom

Though North Caldwell, N.J., may be the fictional home of Tony Soprano, the show is largely filmed at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City. James Gandolfini, a.k.a. Tony Soprano, lives in a Tribeca loft. And Jersey-raised Sopranos creator David Chase, sources say, is now sniffing around a fancy Upper East Side condo.

Though an HBO spokesman for Mr. Chase would not comment, real-estate sources say that the Sopranos producer, creator and creative director has toured a three-bedroom rental apartment at 610 Park Avenue, on the market for $19,500 a month, three times this winter.

The fancy condo building, formerly the Mayfair Hotel, is a 15-story brown-brick building erected in 1925. It was converted to 40 condos in 2000 and houses the four-star restaurant Daniel in its former lobby. The chef-restaurateur Daniel Boulud keeps an apartment in the building, as does singer Luther Vandross.

Only since his show got picked up has Mr. Chase become a New Yorker. Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., he's spent most of his life in the Garden State. The only child of an engineer turned hardware-store owner and a telephone-directory proofreader, he moved to Clifton, N.J., at the age of 5 and then to North Caldwell, the setting for his show. He majored in English at N.Y.U. but then got his master's in film at Stanford University and moved to Los Angeles in 1971, where he lived for the next 30 years writing for television.

Reports say his current address is in Gramercy Park, but sources say that may not be the case for very long.

HELL'S KITCHEN

457 West 43rd Street One-bed, one-and-a-half-bath, 1,100-square-foot co-op. Asking: $515,000. Selling: $480,000. Charges: $930; 51 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: three weeks. WEST VILLAGE REFUGEES FIND SHELTER When the owners of a West 13th Street townhouse decided to sell the place, a couple subletting the ground-floor apartment were about to be put out on the street. "It was just a sublet, so they were allowed to do that," said Corcoran Group broker Lisa Camillieri of the owners. The almost homeless couple found another townhouse on West 43rd Street near Tenth Avenue with a ground-floor apartment for sale-this one a duplex with a garden out back. It was just like home, minus the landlord and the irresistibly sky-high resale value.

SOHO

101 Thompson Street Studio, one-bath, 400-square-foot co-op. Asking: $215,000. Selling: $226,000. Charges: $500; 50 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: two weeks.

THE 400-SQUARE-FOOT WAR For sale: an apartment on Thompson Street, between Spring and Prince streets, $500 maintenance. What's the catch? Four hundred square feet in a fifth-floor walk-up. Ouch ! "It looks much bigger," according to Christine Nugent of Insignia Douglas Elliman. That's what they all say. The sellers, a graphic designer and an architect, had made the place livable after 10 years there. Seeing a way out of the madness in June, they put the place on the market with Ms. Nugent and started looking for a one-bedroom apartment in Tribeca. The tiny studio quickly became the center of a turf war between the owners of the one-bedroom apartment on one side of it and the owners of the two-bedroom apartment on the other. Those living in the smaller space won!

TRIBECA

41 Warren Street Two-bed, two-bath, 2,050-square-foot condo. Asking: $1.750 million. Selling: $1.525 million. Charges: $900.66. Taxes: $889.78 Time on the market: five months.

THE NEXT WAVE DOWNTOWN After a year and a half of construction-including reinforcing the whole building from the sub-basement up-seven new lofts at 41 Warren Street came on the market just before Sept. 11, only to be closed after the terrorist attack until November. At that point, said Mary Ellen Cashman of Stribling & Associates, who represented the building in this deal, the developers dropped the price of this unit-with a Viking stove, a terrace off the kitchen and a fireplace-by $200,000, to $1.75 million. An artist and a businessman bought it in early March for an additional $225,000 discount. And that doesn't factor in the additional perks they're now eligible for as new Tribecans.

David E.R. Dangoor, the Swedish executive vice president of Philip Morris International, sold his ninth-floor apartment for about $8 million in December. And, sources say, 13D-a three-bedroom apartment with two wood-burning fireplaces and servant's room and bath on the 14th floor-has just received an $8 million bid. In a smaller deal, Corcoran broker Sharon Baum sold a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor for $950,000.

According to sources familiar with Mr. Dangoor's deal, the new owners have only just moved in. The apartment originally came on the market at the beginning of March 2001, around the same time that Mr. Dangoor purchased a duplex apartment on the second and third floors of the building for $10.5 million. When the couple first moved into the building, they had one child. By the time they bought the duplex downstairs, they had four. Mr. Dangoor and his wife, Ida Weitzen, gained an extra bedroom in the move. The Dangoors' former apartment was initially priced at $7 million, but one month later that was raised to $8.6 million.

Before these sales, residents of 770 Park Avenue-including Karenna Gore's in-laws, David and Lisa Schiff; Alan McFarland, a partner in the private investment bank McFarland Dewey & Co.; and Michael Lynne, co-chairman of New Line Cinema-hadn't had a new neighbor in a few years.

UPPER WEST SIDE

255 West 90th Street Three-bed, two-bath, 2,300-square-foot co-op. Asking: $1.4 million. Selling: $1.1 million. Charges: $1,953.76; 45 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: 11 years. BROTHERS-AND ROOMMATES-PRACTICE VALUE-INVESTING On Sept. 27, 1990, two brothers who'd shared this apartment for 30 years put it on the market to see how much they could get for it. They set the price at $575,000; on Jan. 15, 2002, it sold for twice that. "This baby has been on the market for quite some time," said Karen Gastiaburo, of William B. May, the last in a long line of brokers and the one who was finally able to convince the brothers that the price was right. "Some people have a number in their head, and it is very hard to get them to change that," she said. In fact, the brothers have been throwing out a lot of numbers over the past 11 years. As the stock market crumbled in the early 90's, the price of the apartment dropped to $475,000 in 1993. When the economy began to pick up in 1995, the price rose to $695,000. In 1997, it was $750,000; in 1998, $795,000. At the peak of the market, in March of 2000, the price rose to $1.65 million, but then the stock market crashed again and the price dropped a few months later to $1.4 million. It had settled there when a couple that works in finance offered them $1.1 million. The brothers might have happily held out even longer, said Ms. Gastiaburo. They didn't start looking for a new place until they had a signed contract on this place late last summer. The buyers were represented by Sandra Thompson of Stribling & Associates.

UPPER EAST SIDE

340 East 74th Street Two-bed, two-bath, 1,200-square-foot co-op. Asking: $585,000. Selling: $570,000. Charges: $1,203; 55 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: two months. DOUBLE DATE ON THE ROOF Acorner unit with north, east and south exposures, this apartment had just been renovated by the sellers when it went up for sale. It now has a much nicer kitchen and hardwood doors. The building, a 13-story co-op located between First and Second avenues, also has some great features: a garage, a 24-hour doorman, a storage room in the basement, and what broker James Kim of Insignia Douglas Elliman describes as "the nicest common roof terrace on the Upper East Side." What makes it so nice? It's entirely planted, with comfortable furniture and an elaborate herb garden that the residents maintain as a group project. According to Mr. Kim, the buyers, a couple who'd just gotten married, liked the roof-especially since they have friends in the building to party with.

CHELSEA

254 West 25th Street One-bed, one-bath, 600-square-foot co-op. Asking: $339,000. Selling: $320,000. Charges: $535; 45 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: five weeks. THE NOT-SINGLE-FOR-LONG BUILDING Where are we, Chelsea or Charleston? This 24-unit building between Seventh and Eighth avenues has a lending library, a common roof garden, and a courtyard with a picnic table and a barbecue grill. One thing it doesn't have: owners who usually flip their apartments for a quick buck. Then again, when a woman bought this apartment in the summer of 1999, she didn't have a fiancé either. She liked the sliding doors between the bedroom and living room and the windowed kitchen, but she liked the guy who popped the question even better. So she sold this place to another single woman who works for an architect and is looking forward to doing some work on the place. No word on whether she's also looking for a fiancé. (Tina Soares of the Corcoran Group represented the seller.)

Then the front door to the house opened and a couple emerged.

"It's a dream house. It's so quiet," said the woman, coming down the stoop.

"And the price was right," said her companion.

Then Danny DeVito yelled, "Cut!"

Surrounded by cameras, a film crew and plenty of paparazzi, the actors were filming one of the final scenes of a comedy called Duplex , about a couple who try-and fail-to kill their upstairs neighbor for her two-story apartment.

To be released by Miramax Films in February 2003, Duplex -despite one crew member's hope that "it translates outside of the city"-is about the two most valuable things to a New Yorker: a good deal and a lot of space. Duplex is a darker variation of the old one-liner in Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally : If you need an apartment, read the obituaries. But it also speaks to a very raw New York debate:

Manhattan vs. Brooklyn.

The dream house that the couple in Duplex wants to score is not in a Sex and the City Upper East Side co-op or near Central Park West (see almost any Woody Allen film), or even in the West Village.

It's in a brownstone in Park Slope, a Brooklyn neighborhood newly populated by young, upwardly mobile New Yorkers-some making a stand against Manhattan's high prices for small spaces, and many dazzled by the possibilities of Park Slope's charming brownstones. The decision to cross the East River is either one that's harrowing and doesn't last long-perhaps because it throws a wrench in the social life-or one that's simple and lasts forever. Current Park Slope residents include John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Paul Auster.

Larry Doyle, who wrote the original screenplay for Duplex and moved to Park Slope with his wife in 1995, is another.

A former writer for The Simpsons , Mr. Doyle, who lived in New York for six years before moving to Los Angeles, sized up the Brooklyn-Manhattan debate this way: "We moved to Brooklyn because we couldn't afford something we could live in Manhattan," he said. "Living in Manhattan apartments, for me, was like being in jail: They were one room with bars on the windows."

He and his wife found a duplex in an 1880's brownstone at 120 Prospect Park West. "It was one of those brownstones that gets carved up," said Mr. Doyle. "The ceilings had a lot of ornate carved wood, we had four fireplaces, the dining room was originally a library, and there were all these built-in hutches and things …. It was about four more rooms than we could have afforded in Manhattan," he said.

In the original script, Mr. Doyle put in something that his wife said to him the first day they moved in: "We're millionaires"-even though they'd only paid $250,000 for the place. "I'm sure that has tripled now," he said.

The similarities between his real life and the movie end there, he said-for instance, he and his wife never considered knocking off an elderly neighbor for an even better pad. But the location scouts were interested in every detail, trying to find a house just like Mr. Doyle's. They settled for a brownstone on a tree-lined block of Berkeley Place near Eighth Avenue. Mr. DeVito, the film's director, thought it suitable because it stands out from the other homes on the block, but not too much. He also liked that it was across the street from a little playground-perfect for a scene in which Drew Barrymore's character stares out the window, imagining having babies in her new home.

Then again, at that point, the movie's just getting started.

EAST HAMPTON

Neighbors Swap Land to Buffer Maidstone

It seems there's only one way to curb construction on Long Island's East End: find a rich homeowner willing to pay for some privacy, or at least an unobstructed view.

New York architect Jaquelin Robertson knew that well when he sold the 3.7-acre property at 4 Maidstone Lane in February for $5 million, according to town records. The land is currently undeveloped farm land, and the buyer, Lawrence Flinn Jr., a retired media mogul, plans to keep it that way, at least for now.

Mr. Flinn, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes magazine last fall at $1.8 billion, owns a house on Hook Pond next to the parcel he bought from Mr. Robertson, which in turn abuts the tennis courts and golf course of the Maidstone Club. He told The Observer that he has "no plans to develop the land in the foreseeable future."

Mr. Robertson bought the property in 1994 for a little under $2 million. After years of poring over different plans, he decided instead to build an addition to his place on Dunemere Lane and sell the property. He put it on the market for $5.9 million in 1998. In Mr. Flinn, he said, he found an "ideal buyer."

"He always wanted a long field that one could drive by on the way to his property, as it used to be in the house that he grew up in," said Mr. Robertson of the new owner. "I think his real interest is in protecting his property …. It's ideal for me, it's ideal for the club, it's ideal for the town."

As if it wasn't already an exclusive enclave, Mr. Robertson, Mr. Flinn and other residents have a history of taking things into their own hands in their East End neighborhood. They've recently planted rows of beech trees along either side of Maidstone Lane.

"They're young now," said Mr. Robertson of the slow-growing sap-lings, "but in 20, 30, 50 years, that is going to be one of the great streets of the East End."

UPPER EAST SIDE

343 East 74th Street (the Forum Two-bed, three-bath, 2,300-square-foot co-op. Asking: $995,000. Selling: $900,000. Charges: $3,935; 60 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: six months. DEVELOPER'SHAND-ME-DOWN APPRECIATES When this co-op building on 74th Street near First Avenue went up in 1987, one of the developers snagged the penthouse for himself and had the place built to his specific tastes. The finished pad has high ceilings, an oversized living room with three exposures, two bedrooms, a small den and a balcony. Fifteen years later, the place still impresses, apparently. A semi-retired antiques dealer in his 70's who was selling a townhouse on the Upper East Side just bought the place. Of course, he'll have to make his mark by doing a little work on it before moving in, according to his broker, Martine Lefebvre of the Corcoran Group. Peter Schwartz, also of the Corcoran Group, represented the seller.

3 East 69th Street Three-bed, 3 1/2 bath, 2,200-square-foot co-op. Asking: $1.99 million. Selling: $1.85 million. Charges: $3,038.56; 42 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: 28 weeks. SHE KNOWS WHAT BUYERS LIKE In March, Corcoran Group broker Jayne Firtell, then a broker at Insignia Douglas Elliman, got a call from a couple who had just moved to London and needed to sell their duplex apartment in a brownstone just off Fifth Avenue. No problem, said Ms. Firtell. Then she got the keys, had a look and realized there was a huge problem. "It was clutter after clutter," she said. So she struck a new deal with the sellers, who hired her to make the place presentable and then sell it for them. "I was wearing two hats," said Ms. Firtell. "I was their exclusive broker and their decorator and designer." She shoved trinkets in dresser drawers and stuck redundant floor lamps into closets. She bought new bedding for the beds so they would look more formal, replaced a carpet in a downstairs bedroom, and had the entire place repainted in colors she chose herself. She had a pedestal sink put in the downstairs powder room and chose light fixtures for the kitchen-all bankrolled by the sellers, of course. "I was very firm with them," said Ms. Firtell. "I said, 'This is what you have to do if you want to get it sold,' and they said, 'You tell us what has to be done.'" The place sold for $140,000 under the asking price.

CHELSEA

360 West 22nd Street (London Town House) Three-bed, two-bath, 1,600-square-foot co-op. Asking: $749,000. Selling: $729,000. Charges: $1,300; 56 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: one month. COUPLE SELLS CO-OP, BUYS PUPPY This 1,600-square-foot apartment on a high floor of a 17-story building on 22nd Street near Ninth Avenue has a few suburban-home trappings: three exposures that provided a whole lot of light, a full-fledged laundry room and a satellite dish. Still, the sellers were ready to hightail it to Long Island after having a second child. According to broker Dan Gerstein, vice president of D.G. Neary Realty, a window-shopping couple showed up at the open house and made an offer. To celebrate, the sellers went out and bought a puppy-the kind you should only have in the suburbs.

UPPER EAST SIDE

Who Will Pay $12.5 m. For Otto Preminger's House?

"The interesting thing, I think, is that it was Otto Preminger's house," said Alexandra Champalimaud, standing in the dirty limestone foyer of 129 East 64th Street. "We kind of love that-it gives good karma."

All the same, Ms. Champalimaud and her husband, Bruce Schnitzer, chairman of Wand Partners, a private equity firm in the city, have expunged any trace of the director of Laura and The Man with the Golden Arm after buying the house from his estate for $2.225 million in May of 1994.

Ms. Champalimaud said that, in fact, she was lured by the prospect of redoing everything about the house.

Preminger's million-dollar screening room, complete with a retractable screen that closed off a picture window, remote control 35-millimeter and 16-millimeter projectors, and a sound system, is now a double-height library with a classical 17th-century Portuguese patterned wood floor and an oversized fireplace done in antique French brick, with a 17th-century original stone mantle from Portugal, where Ms. Champalimaud was born.

Preminger's pebbled sculpture garden is now a lot less Zen-with antique Portuguese garden tiles, columns and a 17th-century fountain.

Still, the couple calls the seven-story house near Lexington Avenue "Otto"-and any good karma might come in handy as they see if they can get $12.5 million for it.

After three years of renovations, the 8,000-square-foot, 20-foot-wide house is about a month from completion, and the couple is floating the place on the market. "We're not sure what we're going to do," said Ms. Champalimaud, who has her own interior-decorating business on Union Square and lives with her husband and four kids in a loft downtown.

If they were able to get $12.5 million, the price would represent a hike over anything ever paid on the block. The house next door at 131 East 64th Street-also with 8,000 square feet, but without a garden and in need of a major renovation-recently sold for $5.7 million. And the highest price to date for a townhouse on that block is $7.5 million for 121 East 64th Street. That was in the summer of 2000.

Anne Snee, a broker at the Corcoran Group who sold 129 East 64th Street for Preminger's estate, said the place was in such bad condition when Preminger died in 1986 that it took over seven years to sell. "It was painful," said Ms. Snee. "It was old, old modern-outdated modern."

The renovation started with the façade. "When we bought it, the exterior of the house was very 60's, very straight looking," said Ms. Champalimaud on a recent tour. "We wanted to turn it into something personal, so the exterior has an 18th-century Portuguese feel to it, which is what I like."

The couple hired the classicist British architect Christopher Smallwood, who had done work for Queen Elizabeth, to design the exterior, which now has a two-story Indiana limestone base and green stucco above. The upper windows have ornate ironwork in front of them.

Inside, in the foyer, there had been marble floors. Now, Ms. Champalimaud said, "this is all limestone … all 17th-century Portuguese." Directly off the front hall is the dining room, "and there is 18th-century tile in here," she said, gesturing to the floor. Beyond that is the garden.

The second floor of the house has a small study in front, and a large living room towards the back with French doors opening onto a terrace. Pointing to a semicircle window with intricate ironwork through it, Ms. Champalimaud said, "It's an Adam's window I bought in England."

On the third floor, there's a small office, a master bathroom with hand-painted Portuguese tiles, and a master bedroom with a balcony off it. Throughout the house, there are Portuguese-inspired moldings around the windows, wood slatted ceilings and wood and glass transoms above the doors.

The fourth, sixth and seventh floors have two bedrooms each; the seventh floor also has a kitchenette and a roof deck. The double-height library occupies the front of the fifth and sixth floors. Another large bedroom occupies the rear of the fifth floor. The cellar, with French terra-cotta floors, has a laundry room and bathroom.

"I don't think there is another house like it," said Ms. Champalimaud of the place, which has been so personalized by her that it will be hard for her to sell, even if someone offers her the money she's asking. "And, well, in New York, I don't know that there would be."

"The interesting thing, I think, is that it was Otto Preminger's house," said Alexandra Champalimaud, standing in the dirty limestone foyer of 129 East 64th Street. "We kind of love that-it gives good karma."

All the same, Ms. Champalimaud and her husband, Bruce Schnitzer, chairman of Wand Partners, a private equity firm in the city, have expunged any trace of the director of Laura and The Man with the Golden Arm after buying the house from his estate for $2.225 million in May of 1994.

Ms. Champalimaud said that, in fact, she was lured by the prospect of redoing everything about the house.

Preminger's million-dollar screening room, complete with a retractable screen that closed off a picture window, remote control 35-millimeter and 16-millimeter projectors, and a sound system, is now a double-height library with a classical 17th-century Portuguese patterned wood floor and an oversized fireplace done in antique French brick, with a 17th-century original stone mantle from Portugal, where Ms. Champalimaud was born.

Preminger's pebbled sculpture garden is now a lot less Zen-with antique Portuguese garden tiles, columns and a 17th-century fountain.

Still, the couple calls the seven-story house near Lexington Avenue "Otto"-and any good karma might come in handy as they see if they can get $12.5 million for it.

After three years of renovations, the 8,000-square-foot, 20-foot-wide house is about a month from completion, and the couple is floating the place on the market. "We're not sure what we're going to do," said Ms. Champalimaud, who has her own interior-decorating business on Union Square and lives with her husband and four kids in a loft downtown.

If they were able to get $12.5 million, the price would represent a hike over anything ever paid on the block. The house next door at 131 East 64th Street-also with 8,000 square feet, but without a garden and in need of a major renovation-recently sold for $5.7 million. And the highest price to date for a townhouse on that block is $7.5 million for 121 East 64th Street. That was in the summer of 2000.

Anne Snee, a broker at the Corcoran Group who sold 129 East 64th Street for Preminger's estate, said the place was in such bad condition when Preminger died in 1986 that it took over seven years to sell. "It was painful," said Ms. Snee. "It was old, old modern-outdated modern."

The renovation started with the façade. "When we bought it, the exterior of the house was very 60's, very straight looking," said Ms. Champalimaud on a recent tour. "We wanted to turn it into something personal, so the exterior has an 18th-century Portuguese feel to it, which is what I like."

The couple hired the classicist British architect Christopher Smallwood, who had done work for Queen Elizabeth, to design the exterior, which now has a two-story Indiana limestone base and green stucco above. The upper windows have ornate ironwork in front of them.

Inside, in the foyer, there had been marble floors. Now, Ms. Champalimaud said, "this is all limestone … all 17th-century Portuguese." Directly off the front hall is the dining room, "and there is 18th-century tile in here," she said, gesturing to the floor. Beyond that is the garden.

The second floor of the house has a small study in front, and a large living room towards the back with French doors opening onto a terrace. Pointing to a semicircle window with intricate ironwork through it, Ms. Champalimaud said, "It's an Adam's window I bought in England."

On the third floor, there's a small office, a master bathroom with hand-painted Portuguese tiles, and a master bedroom with a balcony off it. Throughout the house, there are Portuguese-inspired moldings around the windows, wood slatted ceilings and wood and glass transoms above the doors.

The fourth, sixth and seventh floors have two bedrooms each; the seventh floor also has a kitchenette and a roof deck. The double-height library occupies the front of the fifth and sixth floors. Another large bedroom occupies the rear of the fifth floor. The cellar, with French terra-cotta floors, has a laundry room and bathroom.

"I don't think there is another house like it," said Ms. Champalimaud of the place, which has been so personalized by her that it will be hard for her to sell, even if someone offers her the money she's asking. "And, well, in New York, I don't know that there would be."

the press that he's never so happy as when he's on his ranch in Jackson Hole,

Wyo., but the 59-year-old actor has just bought another apartment in Manhattan.

With kids in school in the city, Mr. Ford and his estranged wife,

Melissa Mathison, have had a rather proper Central Park West co-op for some

time. Now Mr. Ford has acquired a 5,000-square-foot penthouse near Sixth Avenue

in Chelsea that was asking $6.25 million. Broker Jan Hashey of Insignia Douglas

Elliman was the exclusive broker on the sale, which was final in January.

The Chelsea loft wasn't the only downtown space Mr. Ford

considered. Brokers said he looked at a penthouseat420West Broadway, the old

home of Leo Castelli's downtown gallery, as well as an apartment in the new

development at 19 Beach Street in Tribeca.

Mr. Ford has been staying at Soho's Mercer Hotel while waiting

for his apartment to be ready. Since the space was delivered "raw," Mr. Ford

has retained 1100 Architect-designers of the J. Crew, Armani and MoMA stores in

Soho, as well as the Greenwich Village residence of Eric Fischl and April

Gornik and Ross Bleckner's six-story house on White Street in Tribeca-to design

it.

According to plans filed with the city's Department of Buildings,

Mr. Ford has obtained approval to configure the space with walls and bathrooms,

a chimney and fireplace as well as a stairway leading from the apartment to a

planned 3,500-square-foot roof deck. In the records, the cost of the basic

renovations will run about $250,000.

That won't begin to cover the city boy's décor.

House, Owners Part After Long Affair

After a 30-year romance, a spectacular yet worn 1905

Beaux Arts townhouse at 131 East 64th Street and its owner, Emmanuel Sella, an

immigrant businessman who had an amazing past himself, have parted ways.

Born in Lithuania in 1925, Sella stowed away on a ship

headed to Palestine and arrived in Tel Aviv just eight days before World War II

broke out, with very little more than the names and addresses of relatives sewn

into his pants' pockets by his mother. He fought in an underground military

organization for Israeli independence, and at the age of 23 was appointed the commander

of the coastal defenses. After Israel was established as an independent state,

Sella worked for the Ministry of Labor in the development department. Soon

after, he landed a scholarship to study in the U.S., where he got a bachelor's

degree from Syracuse and a Master's of Arts from Harvard.

After moving to New

York, he founded the Amivest Corporation, an investment-management company that

acquired a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1973. One year prior to that,

he had acquired an Upper East Side townhouse for $325,000.

The 20-foot-wide, five-story house between Park and

Lexington avenues had been built in 1905 by architect Augustus N. Allen. The

façade is grand and elegant, with a large centered, segmented, arched entrance

with a wrought-iron front door, three-sided metal bay window on the second and

third floors and three balconies. Inside, the parlor floor has a circular music

room, a living room and a formal dining room. The third floor has two large

bedrooms and an outdoor terrace, and both the fourth and fifth floors have

three bedrooms.

Raising five children in the New York townhouse, Sella

also bought a house north of Tel Aviv and went on to help establish the first

supermarket chain in Israel; he also helped finance and build the Tel Aviv Hilton

hotel.

In the early 90's, he toyed with selling the 64th

Street house, located on a block where many houses have changed hands recently

for as much as $5.2 million. Townhouse brokers recall showing the five-story

home in 1995, but Nancy Candib of Brown Harris Stevens, who is handling the

property now, said the house was taken off the market after a month.

Sella passed away last June, and four months later his

widow put the house on the market for $6.9 million. In the second week of

January, the price was dropped to $5.9 million, and one week later a contract

was signed for close to the asking price.

According to Ms. Candib, the well-lived-in house has

great bones but needs updating. On the other hand, the buyer-a not-for-profit

foundation-was more interested in the large number of bedrooms that can be

turned into private offices. The buyers were represented by Leslie J. Garfield.

Sella's widow, Aviva, is reluctantly looking for

another residence in the city-though, brokers said, it won't be home.

UPPER EAST SIDE

1020

Park Avenue

Two-bed, two-and-a-half-bath,

1,750-square-foot co-op.

Asking:

$1.250 million. Selling: $1.125 million.

Charge:

$1,657; 40 percent tax-deductible.

Time

on the market: six weeks.

MIKE-MINDED Just as incoming Mayor

Michael Bloomberg couldn't quite make his way around the idea of leaving his

lavish mansion near Fifth Avenue for creaky old yellow clapboard digs near a

dog run on East End Avenue, a Southern couple retiring to the city couldn't imagine

themselves living in a white box. This apartment's house-like orientation

lowered their blood pressure quite a bit. Located in a respectable but not too

fancy building near East 85th Street, this duplex co-op has a large foyer, a

dining room and a spiral staircase leading up to a second floor with two

bedrooms, each with its own full bath. According to broker Norma Hirsh of

Insignia Douglas Elliman, the couple had looked at several more claustrophobic

properties before deciding to buy this one, near their children's homes.

Apparently, however, the couple also couldn't imagine themselves haggling with

a New Yorker, as they paid the asking price for the apartment.

UPPER WEST SIDE

12 West 72nd Street (the Oliver Cromwell)

Two-bed, two-bath, 1,100-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $699,000. Selling: $699,000.

Charges: $1,549; 68 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: six weeks.

MAJORING

IN PREWAR When it was built in the 1920's by Emery Roth, this 30-story

building between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue seemed to be aiming to

house rulers of industry. Named after Oliver Cromwell-the 17th-century English

Civil War leader who, besides having King Charles I beheaded for treason, is

probably most famous for having the largest cranium of any English ruler

(though he refused the title of king himself, ruling England for 15 years as

its "Lord Protector")-the building was called "one of Manhattan's finest

free-standing towers of the 1920's" by architecture writer Steven Ruttenbaum.

With its two-story arched entrance and opulent lobby, it lured a television and

film producer from her beloved neighborhood of Gramercy Park several years ago.

"She's a prewar lover," said broker Marcia Rosen-House, of Bellmarc Realty, of

her client. And while she may not be precisely the resident the architect had

in mind, the woman is ruled by her job. After taking pains to restore the very

traditional apartment-which has three exposures, high-beamed ceilings and now,

a new kitchen, renovated bathrooms and new wood floors-she was offered a job

out of town and put her apartment up for sale in August. According to Ms.

Rosen-House, for the seller "it was an opportunity to move up again." She's

found a gracious home down South.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

77 East 12th Street

One-bed, one-bath, 650-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $349,000. Selling: $337,500.

Charges $638; 27 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: one day.

GOING … GOING … GONE A native of Atlanta bought this apartment in 1998

and had been gradually renovating it himself. As if anticipating the downturn

in the economy, he moved in with roommates in Chelsea and started to collect

rent on the co-op. But last fall, when his tenant lost his job, instead of

finding a new tenant, the landlord decided to sell the place. He contacted

broker Margaret Heffernan, a neighbor, and asked her to help him sell the small

one-bedroom co-op-quick. With speed in mind, Ms. Heffernan said she priced the

apartment low, but when the place sold to a young couple who had been renting a

studio elsewhere in the building, the price dropped some more: The buyers were

able to negotiate the price down an additional $11,500. Though they may have

gotten a better deal, Ms. Heffernan said they are not the first renters to end

up buying an apartment in the building. "I had two sales last year to people

who were renting in this building," she said. "All of our renters always seem

interested in buying here."