Fear not, I'm but an LIRR ride away. (Getty)

Isabella Rossellini is one of those quintessential New York ladies. Born overseas to beautiful people, she moved here to model, then to act, married and divorced Martin Scorsese and eventually got a cameo on 30 Rock. That is why it is so sad to see her leaving town.Ms. Rossellini has just sold her Upper East Side penthouse for $3.05 million, according to city records. Like a bee copulating, it was fast work. The three-bedroom condo atop 30 East 86th Street went into contract in all of 20 days back in March, though the deed was not filed until two days ago. There appears to have been a bidding war, as well, as the asking price was all of $2.895 million.

It's a nice performance for what The Observer called a "Homey $1.79 M. Condo on the Park" back when Ms. Rossellini bought the home in 2003: "Her new spread is just over half the size of her old place on East 85th Street--a 3,000-square-foot penthouse that went on the market last February for $5.49 million. Still, her new home is no utility studio. The West 86th Street apartment has 1,800 square feet, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a double-height living room whose glass casing gives it a greenhouse-like feel."

Her broker, Richard Healy of Halstead, puts it much more nicely in his listing: "2 Large Terraces facing South & North, 11- foot ceilings Incredible NYC Skyline Views, European Style Renovation Reminiscent of 1930s BAUHAUS Modern Style," he writes.

The buyers, with an apparent flair for things Northern European, are Christopher Acito, founder of two-year old hedge fund Gapstow Capital Partners, and Jaleh Amouzegar, an admissions assistant at Brearly.

According to the deed, Ms. Rossellini has retired from the city to the Long Island town of Bellport. She is not the first fashionable lady to call the town home. As a young girl, Jackie Kennedy used to summer there with her mother in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

But Mr. Galifinakis’ presence at the gala was representative of a mood there that celebrated the younger elements in both the audience and the company. Caroline Kennedy, whose late mother was a board member, praised the ABT’s efforts to engage a wider audience through touring. Then, accepting an award marking his 25-year trusteeship, billionaire David Koch spoke reverently of the “beautiful young bodies” that would soon grace the stage.

The whirlwind performance was a preview of 13 shows forthcoming this season, the company’s 70th. Dancers were whisked on and off the stage, leaping from Vivaldi to Tchaikovsky to a heady piece involving the music of Robert Fripp, strobe lights and levitation.

After the show, guests dined in a massive tent in Lincoln Center, where Bebe Neuwirth called the evening “thrill after thrill after thrill.” She’d handed out scholarships for the ABT during the meal and afterward spoke eagerly with all dancers who approached. “I entered ballet class at age 5 and in some ways I never left,” she told us.

Actress Isabella Rossellini said that she particularly favored a hot-and-heavy sampling from a ballet based on the Dumas novel Lady of Camellias (opening May 25). She was seated next to the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb.

“I think it’s great for ballet and opera to bring new audiences in. That’s what the art form’s all about,” he said.

Can we count on him continuing to shake things up with that goal in mind?

“I’m staying on the course that I began.”

On Valentine’s Day, date movies usually proliferate. This year, with so many slasher flicks, techno-thrillers and alleged comedies marketed for mental retards, you’re better off staying home with a box of chocolate truffles. One interesting exception is Two Lovers with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, two actors who almost never land a role worthy of their talents. (Were Shakespeare in Love and Walk the Line just flukes?)

Two Lovers has roots in pure soap opera, but its gentle pacing and delicate performances lift it blithely above the dangers of parody as it tells the story of two tortured misfits groping in the dark for human contact. Mr. Phoenix plays Leonard, a stammering bipolar man with an almost visibly agonizing inability to communicate, living at home and working as a deliveryboy in his family’s dry cleaning business across the river from Manhattan. The film begins when he jumps off a bridge to commit suicide, then swims back to the surface to clear up some unfinished business with his empty life. Leonard has a history of such attempts, and when he goes off his meds, his worried mother (Isabella Rossellini) has good reason for her gray hair. But Leonard is no ordinary sad-faced Jewish failure heading for middle age with diffidence and dread. He’s nice, polite to a fault, something of a clown around children, but so depressed he sleeps all day. “Like a vampire,” sighs his overprotective mother. Things brighten when an alluring blond shiksa named Michelle (Ms. Paltrow) moves into the building and a casual friendship turns obsessional. She drags Leonard to Manhattan into the heart of the club scene, and for a while Leonard goes down the rabbit hole. Leonard’s parents have already picked out a sweet Jewish girl named Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) to share his life, but once he falls under the spell of the gorgeous all-American Michelle, quiet evenings at home with Chinese takeout no longer have the same homey appeal. Ms. Paltrow (who in real life is half-Jewish herself) is the quintessential WASP dream girl from The Heartbreak Kid.

Unfortunately, she has more problems than Leonard does. Michelle is in the middle of a miserable affair with a married man, pregnant, and no stranger to alcohol and drugs. He’s torn between two women—the available Jewish girl who loves him unconditionally but bores him, and his pill-popping neurotic neighbor, beautiful but lost. Sandra’s family wants to set him up in business, guaranteeing him a future with security. But Leonard is hooked on the wrong girl—carrying Michelle to the hospital when she has a miscarriage, meeting her on the roof at dawn to lend a sympathetic ear to her troubles, ordering tickets for them both to escape to a new life in San Francisco and buying an engagement ring. I’m taking no bets on what happens next, but suffice it to say Two Lovers is a case of the blind leading the blind, each having just enough vision to break the other’s heart.

Directed by James Gray—who specializes in gangster themes like The Yards and We Own the Night, both of which starred Mr. Phoenix—this film, inspired by the Dostoyevsky story “White Nights,” marks a welcome change of pace, and is devoid of the unexpected. From the opening shot of a bird flying across the misty skyline before settling on Leonard’s aborted suicide jump, contrasting animal freedom with human entrapment, Two Lovers might be too well crafted—and possibly too old-fashioned and traditional—to cause much excitement among pretentious critics. But in every sense of the word, it’s an adult film that wears its heart on its sleeve—a giant step forward for Mr. Gray. And for Ms. Paltrow, who hasn’t appeared in a deserving role since playing suicidal poet Sylvia Plath in 2003. Mr. Phoenix is an extraordinary mixture of vulnerability, infantilism, sophistication and self-delusion. His attempt to woo Michelle with a flash of bold John Travolta break dancing is a great scene, and with his manic moods switching between ecstasy and depression, his stupid mistakes, social gaffes and juvenile attempts at humor are rendered all the more touching. At 34, with a maturity beyond his years, he’s one of the screen’s most admirable risk takers, but since the completion of Two Lovers, he’s announced his retirement from acting to pursue a career in rap music. If true, it’s a big loss. Recent news photos reveal him to be overweight and unkempt, his face covered with long, freaky hair. What gets into these people? Have they stayed too long at the fair? Or is it the Hollywood tap water?

rreed@observer.com

"Originally we thought ‘JustOneDay,'" she explained. "We wanted it to be inspirational but we didn't want it to be-we wanted to give it a little bit of funk, you know? So we put in the frickin because it made people realize that it was very minimal, actually, and that if you pull together you can actually get a lot of stuff done."

The website calculates a person's daily salary, post-tax, and encourages them to give that amount to The Burundi Solar Project, which is raising $450,000 to install solar panels on a hospital in Burundi.

"We figured out that for somebody who makes $30,000 a year, you make about $82 a day," she said brightly, adding that if that sum seemed steep, one could also buy a T-shirt designed by one of her designer friends (she handed one to the Daily Transom by Chris Benz featuring canoodling African flamingos), which go on sale today for $60 each. Ms. Wiedemann will fete the T-shirts at a September 6 party at the Morgan Hotel; today, she blogged about them on the Huffington Post.

"It's the first of a series of [solar] projects taking place throughout Africa," she explained, adding that her website will also take on a variety of other fundraising initiatives. "So it's Burundi, then Lesotho..." She pronounced it correctly, Le-SOO-Too.

Ms. Wiedemann, who is 25, wore a cream-colored v-neck t-shirt designed by Giambattista Valli, one of the designer friends she'd solicited, with a studded vintage belt, jean shorts, and no apparent makeup. When she lowered large black sunglasses over her eyes, a wisp of unwashed hair fell in her face, exposing her international supermodel status to passerby.

She estimated that she herself has already given far in excess of a day's salary: "James [Marshall, her British boyfriend] and I are the ones who funded all of the t-shirts, all of the silk screening, all of that, and we're not getting any of that money back. So that was our contribution to the whole effort, was"-her voice lowered to a whisper- "several thousand dollars."

Ms. Wiedemann has always been interested in environmental issues. "I was raised kind of at a conservation center down in Florida," she explained. "With endangered species and animals and a lot of zoologists, and so a lot of my youth memories are at this place and kind of playing with baby gazelles and baby cheetahs." Her mother's best friend, she explained, was the late philanthropist and paper entrepreneur Howard Gilman, who had a plantation near Jacksonville dedicated to wildlife conservation. Ms. Rossellini and her daughter used to retire there on weekends. During the week, Ms. Wiedemann lived with her father, Ms. Rossellini's ex Jonathan Wiedemann, on Perry Street.

Ms. Wiedemann's current boyfriend, Mr. Marshall, whose bio on JustOneFrickinDay.com reveals him to be former captain of the Eton Excelsior Rowing Club, now lives across the street from where Ms. Wiedemann grew up on Perry Street. "I met him at a party in London, at a big event about a year and a half ago," she recalled. "And he was moving to New York and I was like, ‘Oh, well give me a buzz,' and he didn't, which was a total bummer. And then I actually took the wrong subway one day, which I never do... and the doors opened and James was standing right in the door. I think we went out for drinks later that week, and we've been together almost a year."

Ms. Wiedemann doesn't have big plans for Fashion Week. She says she doesn't run with that crowd anyway, but with "college students I went to school with" at the New School, from which she recently graduated. She'll soon take a trip to Paris for Lancôme (the company pays to offset all her carbon emissions), complete another modeling gig in Sweden, and then start her biomedicine masters' program at the London School of Economics. "I applied thinking I would never get in, but I got in, so I was like ‘Dammit, now I have to go! So now I'm going.'"

"Maybe one day when this whole modeling fantasy world ends I'll go work for the U.S. government and work on, like, agricultural reform and making farms more sustainable," she mused.

In the meantime, her personal eco-practices include trying not to buy many clothes. "I just read this amazing book by Barbara Kingsolver called Animal Vegetable Miracle," she added. "And it kind of opened my eyes to how horrible I've been with my food habits." She tries not to preach to industry friends because eco-issues might make her sound like a bit of a Debbie Downer. She's just hoping everyone comes around in time.

Ms. Rossellini, for one, is already a convert. "She does her green pornos," said Ms. Wiedemann breezily. "You haven't seen these? You can look them up online. They're for the Sundance Channel, it's not like she's in porn or anything... My mom dresses up as a bug, fly, spider, grasshopper—it sounds so weird!— praying mantis, and explains how bugs have sex. Because didn't you always wonder? I mean, I did, kind of."

Now this should be fun, I thought. Only last summer, I was in Florence standing dutifully before the statue of David, and we had a tour guide, but she didn't look a bit like Isabella Rossellini. Ms. Rossellini looks as if she owns the Accademia, or ought to.

But our tour guide was different. What a bossyboots she was! She was squat, with a big bag on her back, and she wouldn't stop talking the entire time. "Be pleezed to note the veins in David's harms, pleeze. Why eez heez head so grande ? Who know? Follow me! Eez meeraculous, si?"

She was ruining my Stendhal Syndrome. Full Frontal Nudity , Mr. McNally's curtain-raiser at Primary Stages' new home on East 59th Street, reminds us that the ecstatic state known as Stendhal Syndrome was invented by old Stendhal himself when he observed people swooning in the company of great art. It can also happen, incidentally, with bad art, but let's not go into that now. Best to swoon with the best-in the company of Michelangelo or Wagner, who's the pretext for Mr. McNally's second play of the night.

But high art can also function as a bloated device to dress up minor plays that flatter middlebrow audiences into believing they're in cultivated company. Mr. McNally's parodiable American tourists actually condescend to "ordinary" people, and the dramatist's ear for them is tinny. "Wow! This is heavy stuff," he has the dope from New Jersey exclaim as if in a time-warp. "Dig this!"

The opening sketch is meant to reveal how remote artistic genius is from the people (who are nevertheless drawn to it mysteriously). As if that weren't patronizing enough, Mr. McNally descends regrettably to a coarse obviousness. "He's got weird pubic hair down there, don't you think?" asks Leo, the lowlife "character." "Looks like somebody gave him a perm down there." The audience snickers, but not too much. "I can tell you one thing. Only in a museum can you look at another man's dick without people getting the wrong impression, you know what I mean?"

There's also a dim bulb named Hector, who's a grieving English teacher. Ms. Rossellini is the half-cynical tour guide named-of all unlikely things-Bimbi. And there's a bimbo among the tourists named Lana who, we learn, is often called Lana Turner. But she isn't Lana Turner, she's Lana Maxwell. Isn't that funny? Anyway, bickering breaks out around David (the indifferent statue), and Lana decides to tell everyone that "Heil Hitler" is the only German she speaks.

"I'm not a Nazi," she explains, though no one asked. "I just love to watch old war movies. That's where I got 'Heil Hitler' from. But I'm not a Nazi. I'm not even a Republican."

"I bet I can fuck her. I'm sure I can fuck her," Leo thinks to himself about the tempting Lana.

"Let the divine genius of Michel-angelo take you to another point," advises Bimbi.

"I love her tits. That's it, baby, show us your tits!" says Leo.

"How old was Michelangelo when he posed for David?" Lana asks.

Well, you get the point. This is not Terrence McNally at his sparkling best. But the evening perks up with Richard Thomas as the monstrously narcissistic conductor in the second short play, Prelude and Liebestod . Mr. McNally's maestro-possibly based on the bisexual showman, Leonard Bernstein-leads his imaginary symphony orchestra through Wagner's Tristan and Isolde in search of his own orgasmic Stendhal Syndrome.

He has sex on his mind, anyway. So does his sophisticated wife (Isabella Rossellini), looking bored in a box as she thinks of her lover. A young gay groupie (Yul Vazquez) is in another box, lusting after the preening maestro. And the concertmaster (Michael Countryman) tuning his violin has seen it all before.

But Mr. McNally once again settles for easy vulgarity, in blatant contrast to the refinements of Art and Culture with a capital K. The surly opening line of the concertmaster is "Asshole." The opening line of the diva-soprano (Jennifer Mudge) is "Fuck you too, Mister!"

Meanwhile, transported by the swelling orchestra-"That's right, you suckers, come on, play for me. Play through me, music. Surge. Course through me. Fill me up"-our overheated conductor, who's the Evita of the rostrum, sees his wife up in her box reading something. "She's reading! The fucking bitch is fucking reading and you're conducting your fucking ass off," he thinks indignantly to himself as he leads the orchestra to another blissful crescendo. "Jesus, I don't know why I bother."

Prelude and Liebestod is a one-note entertainment in that sense, showing us that the most gifted artists are often as crude and low as the lowest . They aren't "normal"-not like us, right?

But Mr. McNally only grazes the surface of a fascinating, if familiar, debate. How could the talent of an anti-Semite like Wagner be blessed by God? How could saintly Tolstoy abandon his poor, abused wife at a railway station, or James Joyce neglect his insane daughter? Or T.S. Eliot neglect his insane first wife? How about Proust's sexual thrill watching hatpins stuck into rats? How, for that matter, could a genius composer like Mozart behave like a farting idiot savant?

Are we all Salieris now? Do we still believe, in spite of all evidence to the contrary-Mozart's infantilism, Wagner's fascism, Pound's fascism, Coleridge's morphine, Hemingway's bullet, O'Neill's alcoholism, Williams' drugs, Plath's suicide, van Gogh's ear -that good and great art can only be created by good and great normal human beings?

Who-or what-is normal?

But Mr. McNally doesn't really go there. Besides, Amadeus has already been there. The big, crude note he's playing is about great music and orgasmic satisfaction, and he's pushing it a bit. "I told you in rehearsal: You're singing through the wrong hole, honey," the maestro charmingly chastises his soprano. "This is twat music. Listen to it. Listen to the words. You're not singing. You're coming!"

It's a load of bollocks, really. But with Wagner's irresistible Prelude flooding the theater, all seems passionately, romantically, roughly authentic. Prelude and Liebestod is a near-monologue of breathless desire reaching its apex with the conductor's homoerotic fantasy about the greatest sex he's ever had. He was young and beautiful when he met Gugliemo. "I was so beautiful that year-I was perfect-I was all I wanted-all anyone could ever want-and this cocksucker, this arrogant wop, this goddamn glorious dago, he led me on and on and on. A touch, a glance, a brush of thigh …. "

Stop! you might think. But the music is swelling, and so is …. "Hands here, hands there. Hands over my eyes, hands over my mouth. Four hands. Someone else is there. I don't struggle … the past is too remote, the present too frightening …. "

Be that as it may, where is all this hyperventilating stuff heading as the last transporting bars of the Liebestod are played? It has to be to the rapturous Stendhal Syndrome Moment! So it is. And, just in case we don't get Mr. McNally's point, the swooning conductor holds his baton straight up like a phallus and plunges it into his abdomen, his face now transfigured in ecstatic dying.

Richard Thomas has come a long way since John Boy on The Waltons . He gives a terrific performance as the conductor, making the incredible almost credible and the play more fun, perhaps, than it really is. The evening is directed by Leonard Foglia. Isabella Rossellini makes her very welcome New York stage debut. Richard Wagner shows promise.

Their new 1839 Greek Revival townhouse has five stories, but it's currently set up as a four-unit building, with a duplex on the bottom two floors and three floor-through units above.

"She bought a house, but it's not finished yet," confirmed her publicist, Stephen Huvane, who said he didn't know the details of the envisioned renovation.

Presumably, Ms. Moore will seek to convert the building to a one-family residence, but as of press time, she had yet to file a renovation plan with the city's department of buildings. In the meantime, Ms. Moore and her gang are holed up elsewhere in the neighborhood. According to this week's New York magazine, she's currently renting the Greenwich Village townhouse of Christy Turlington. She reportedly negotiated a lease somewhere south of the property's $20,000 per month asking price.

When their stay there is up, Ms. Moore and her family can begin personalizing their new abode. It's a 21-foot-wide building with 4,500 square feet, and the townhouse has original trims, moldings, fireplace mantels, wide plank floors and a 1,090-square-foot garden.

According to a source close to the deal, the house's previous owner, Thomas James, moved to Dallas to become Pizza Hut's chief marketing officer. Efforts to reach Mr. James were unsuccessful. The source said, however, that Mr. James and his wife used to reside in the duplex unit, and they cleared out the building's rent-controlled tenants before putting the house on the market late last year.

For almost the last four years, Ms. Moore and her family have been living in loft apartments at 345 West 13th Street, a former warehouse building in the neighboring meatpacking district. Ms. Moore's first acquisition came in July of 1999, when she bought a low-floor unit in the building for $900,000. In October 2001, she upgraded to the building's $2.65 million penthouse unit, selling the smaller apartment for $1.95 million. By November 2002, however, Ms. Moore and Mr. Freundlich were ready to move again, and put their penthouse unit on the market for $3.9 million. It's currently under contract. At the time, Mr. Huvane told The Observer : "Julianne has always wanted a brownstone, and is shopping for one now."

Well, she's got it-and with the purchase, she joins fellow Greenwich Village townhouse owners Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe, and Edie Falco.

Buy, With a Little Help From Your Friends: Rossellini Continues Sales With $430K Condo

Isabella Rossellini's real-estate divestment continues. On the heels of downgrading from a sprawling 3,000-square-foot Upper East Side penthouse to a more modest Upper West Side perch late last year, the Roger Dodger star recently sold a small financial-district condo that she's owned since 1986. The new owner is a friend of Ms. Rossellini's, who has been renting the apartment for the last 15 years.

"I've known her for 30 years or so," said the owner, Paavo Turtiainen. "It was a pure investment for her, and when it came on the market, I bought it."

Mr. Turtiainen, who said he runs a small catering company out of the apartment, paid $430,000 for the 1,075-square-foot, one-bedroom condo loft, located at 117 Beekman Street.

"It's got high ceilings and lots of light," he said. "It's a beautiful place and a nice building."

Mr. Turtiainen declined to comment on why Ms. Rossellini decided to sell the apartment now, and calls to Ms. Rossellini's press agents were not returned by press time.

In February 2002, Ms. Rossellini put her 3,000-square-foot East 85th Street condo on the market for $5.49 million. By the end of that year, she had purchased a 1,800- square-foot condo on West 86th Street for $1.79 million. She also retains a residence at 25 Central Park West.

RECENT TRANSACTIONS IN THE REAL ESTATE MARKET

CARNEGIE HILL

1088 Park Avenue

Four-bedroom, four-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $5.575 million. Selling: $5.075 million.

Maintenance: $5,027; 39 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: nine months.

LOOK OUT BELOW! Talk about getting in while the getting is good: In 1935, an international corporate lawyer at a major New York firm moved into a rental apartment at this Park Avenue building. In 1941, when the building was still a rental, the lawyer moved with his wife into this duplex penthouse unit, which has four exposures and a 360-degree wrap-around terrace. At the time, they were paying $250 a month. When the building went co-op in the early 1950's, the couple bought the unit for $8,900. They raised four children in the apartment, one of whom told The Observer about his fond memories of the apartment's outdoor space. "It was great fun to throw water-filled balloons onto 88th Street, and snowballs at the cars on Park Avenue," said the son, a semi-retired former furniture-company executive. "Having a terrace is also very useful for walking the dog." The family's patriarch died in 1990, and his 97-year-old wife passed away in October 2001. For almost the last seven decades, they'd been using the same phone number. An investment banker and his wife, a former investment banker herself, are the apartment's new owners. Until recently, they, along with their two young children, had been working and living in Hong Kong. Their new home has approximately 3,500 square feet, three staff rooms and a library, and the building has a quarter-acre interior grass courtyard. Hilda Shamash, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman, shared the listing on this apartment with Mary Rutherfurd, an associate broker at Brown Harris Stevens.

UPPER WEST SIDE

22 West 66th Street

Three-bedroom, three-bathroom condo.

Asking: $2.3 million. Selling: $2.1 million.

Charges: $2,000; taxes: $1,250

Time on the market: eight months.

THE CORRECTIONS To get an idea of the degree to which Manhattan's high-end real-estate market has "corrected" itself over the past three quarters, consider this deal: A residential real-estate investor based in Europe bought this apartment in 1995 for $995,000. The 2,241-square-foot unit has a library with two balconies, four exposures and park views. To the luxe marble kitchen and bathroom finishings that the sponsor had installed, the investor added cherrywood paneling, a wine cooler and attractive window treatments. It was an expensive and heartfelt installation, but when the investor found herself spending less and less time in America, she decided it was time to cash out. So in May of 2002, she put the apartment on the market for $2.95 million. Her broker, Reba Miller, president of R.P. Miller and Associates, received an offer at the full asking price within a week, but the deal fell apart when the buyer discovered that her portfolio had taken a bigger hit than she'd thought. As the summer wore on, fewer and fewer buyers came to see the apartment, and Ms. Miller was forced to reduce the asking price, first to $2.75 million, then to $2.6 million, then to $2.49 million and finally to $2.3 million. When a retired businessman finally closed on the property-eight months after the first looker had been willing to spend $2.95 million-the selling price was $2.1 million.

"Fears about the economy, war, the future of New York-they all played a part, there's no doubt about it," said Ms. Miller. "But at the end of the day, good money was still made, because [my client] only paid $995,000 for the apartment."

Michael Spodek of the Halstead Property Company represented the buyer.

MIDTOWN EAST

330 East 51st Street

Three-story townhouse.

Asking: $1.95 million. Selling: $1.8 million.

Taxes: $8,112.

Time on the market: one year.

IT'S YOUR NUMERALS When real-estate broker Kevin Brown bought this dilapidated shell of a townhouse in August 2000, he intended to add two floors to the building, rehabilitate it and then move in with his family. But thanks to what he called a year and a half of bureaucratic red tape, the townhouse is now owned by the Kabbalah Centre of Florida, and it's unclear what they're planning on doing with the property. But whether it's office space or housing for rabbis, it's a far cry from what Mr. Brown had in mind. When he first toured the ramshackle property almost three years ago, it was 11 p.m. on the night before he was leaving for Europe on business. An owner and senior managing director at Ashforth Warburg Associates, Mr. Brown had long been on the hunt for a fixer-upper, and he seized upon his prize instantly. "I had seen everything on the market," he recalled. "So when [the broker] said: 'One million three fifty,' I said: 'Fine.'" Mr. Brown drew up and submitted his renovation plans within 24 hours. That, he said, was the last time anything related to the property happened with haste. The first roadblock: building permits. "Thinking that I was a man about town, and that I knew so many people, I thought I could get the permits in two to four months," Mr. Brown said. Eight months later, he was still waiting for the city's approval. "I realized it could go on forever," Mr. Brown said. Unwilling to wait in limbo, he bought and combined two apartments at nearby 100 U.N. Plaza and moved in there with his domestic partner and their two adopted children. Their rickety townhouse hit the market in early 2002. Final approval from the city to turn the structure into a five-story building had arrived a full year and a half after Mr. Brown had originally applied. But by then, he was already entertaining offers on the property. Mr. Brown ended up going with the Kabbalah group because, he said, "I had a soft spot for any group dealing with spirituality." But the delays mounted. According to Mr. Brown, the numbers were agreed upon, but the numerology was off: the Kabbalah Centre held off on closing for two months, waiting for an "auspicious day" to finalize the deal. "It was frustrating for my attorney, as well as for their attorney, because we did not know which were the good days and bad days," Mr. Brown said. "Nobody seemed to know exactly what the right date was." Representatives for the Kabbalah Centre didn't return calls for comment.