Kenya may have plenty of villages, but it doesn’t have the Village. And so Joseph Schwartzman, managing director of East African engineering and construction conglomerate H. Young, and his wife, Hannah, had to come all the way to New York City to get a slice of Village life.
The couple just closed on a one-bedroom apartment at The Greenwich, Read More
Last time Bruce Willis tangled with a tower, his Die Hard character escaped from the clutches of a German terrorist group with only his trusty Beretta sidearm. We hope his stay at El Dorado at 300 Central Park West, where he just picked up a co-op apartment, is less eventful.
The four-bedroom spread was rumored to be in contract for $8 million, according to New York Post, but as in The Sixth Sense, there’s a twist at the end of this purchase: Mr. Willis and wife Emma ended up paying $8.85 million for the fourth-floor unit, according to city records—a bit over the asking price of $8.695 million. (Even celebrities, it seems, can’t buy a co-op without listing their name on the need! Or maybe they just wanted the tax abatement?) Read More
“I made my career on films that probably shouldn’t have been made, economically,” production designer Mark Friedberg once told Capital New York. Either things have recently changed for Mr. Friedberg or he was being awfully humble: his movies might not have made sense economically, but they made enough for him to make what appears to be a record-breaking townhouse buy.
Mr. Friedberg and his wife, Lydia Pilcher, just picked up a three-story brownstone at 32 South Portland Avenue for $3.75 million, blowing past the record 181 Washington Park, which sold last spring for $3.28 million. Read More
Rarely do you find a broker with as much knowledge about an apartment as Town Residential’s Paddington Matz has on a full-floor spread she’s marketing at 288 West Street, a loft building dating back to 1860. Not only has she sold the unit four times over (she’s trying now for a fifth), but the first time she sold it, she actually owned it.
“It was the first loft I’d ever bought,” she told The Observer of unit #2W at the Medium Lipstick Building, as it’s known. “I bought it in 1996 for $155,000.” It had been on the market for double that, but this was before Tribeca became the hot neighborhood that it is today. “Back then there wasn’t even a promenade,” said Ms. Matz. “There was a cheapo parking lot on the West Side Highway across the street. It had no services whatsoever—the only grocery store was a Food Emporium.” (Today, said Food Emporium faces competition from a gleaming new Whole Foods just a few blocks to the south.) Read More
Steve Madden has called the townhouse at 175 East 73rd Street home for years, but it looks like the other shoe has finally dropped. The affordable footwear giant listed the house yesterday, asking nearly $9 million. (Like a pair of his namesake mid-market shoes, it was priced with a bunch of trailing 9′s.)
Mr. Madden first moved to the Upper East Side as a renter, from a neighborhood with a slightly less distinguished pedigree—the Federal Correctional Complex in Coleman, Florida, where he was serving a 41-month sentence after being convicted of participating in a pump-and-dump stock scheme. Read More
Dominated by the towers on Second Avenue (rezoned in anticipation of the subway decades ago—speaking of which, how’s that coming along?), Kips Bay has never been the coolest neighborhood. But perhaps Rashid Johnson can turn that ho-hum image around: the post-black, as he calls himself, mixed-media artist and his wife, fellow artist Sheree Hovsepian, just bought a townhouse at 139 Lexington Avenue for $3.7 million, according to city records—a healthy discount off the $4.25 million ask.
The four-story brownstone straddles the border of Kips Bay and NoMad, lying in the dead center of another made-up micro-neighborhood: Rose Hill (the seller was listed only as Rose Hill LLC). Read More
Just two months ago, Curbed reported that a penthouse at Love Lane Mews sold for $2.725 million, setting a new Brooklyn Heights record of $1,482 per square foot.
And according to city records, it looks like the record-setting per-square-foot condo price was no accident: Sean Casey and Emelie Kihlström just bought a fourth-floor unit at 9 College Place—a lovely little lane away from the not-so-busy main streets of Brooklyn Heights. They paid the developer nearly $2.19 million for the unit, which works out to the exact same price per square foot: $1,482. Read More
The El Dorado (our sincerest apologies to the Spanish language) was home to one of New York’s cattiest co-op dramas of 2012, when the co-op board took heiress Diane Wells to court over her formidable smoking habit and fumes they claimed were leaking into neighboring ninth-floor units through a gaping hole in her apartment. ”On multiple occasions,” the complaint read, “the cigarette smoke and odor [have] filled the entry halls on at least the ninth and 10th floors of [the] building, requiring shareholders to traverse a cloud of smoke between the elevator and their apartment entrances.”
Though the board ultimately succeeded in forcing Ms. Wells to allow repairs to her apartment, the board was not able to get her to stub out her cigs—something that apparently didn’t worry Gretchen Pusch and Richard Bayles, who just picked up a classic six on the tenth floor for $2.4 million (down from a $3.3 million ask two years ago—so maybe the cigarette issue persists?). The sale was brokered by Daniel Douglas and Eileen LaMorte at Corcoran. Read More
Josephina, the Lincoln Center standby, stopped serving its pre-theater dinners in 2011, leaving owner Louis Lanza with only one Upper West Side location—Josie’s West. And now it appears that Mr. Lanza is downsizing his neighborhood housing as well.
Mr. Lanza has sold his penthouse spread at The Fitzgerald for $3.32 million, city records show.
But he’s not moving out just yet. Mr. Lanza owned quite a cut of real estate at 201 West 74th Street—not only the three-unit penthouse combo, but also another, separate unit in the building. Some were passed down to Mr. Lanza by his parents, and some he purchased himself. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with knowing what you like. Read More
Master photo retoucher Pascal Dangin might make his living zapping the life-sustaining fat off of models and actresses, but it looks like he’s going to make his fortune in real estate.
Mr. Dangin bought a three-story townhouse in the West Village for $5.8 million in October 2007, right as the housing market was beginning to take a turn for the worse. After a starchitect renovation and a few years waiting for the market to return, he’s now cashing out: Mr. Dangin just sold 281 West Fourth Street to the not-so-staidly-named Crazy Snack 05, LLC for a healthy $9.55 million, according to city records (maybe someone had already snagged 281 West Fourth Street LLC?). Read More
