According to his company's Web site, Mr. Halloran has resided in Moscow since 1995, so we can only infer his recent Park Avenue purchase will serve as a pied-à-terre for the enterprising Putin-ite. Due to the time difference, Mr. Halloran could not immediately be reached for comment.

The past 18 months have proven a rocky real estate ride for Mr. Eisman, who in pre-Lehman 2008, bought a three-bedroom apartment in the same building for $6.995 million. Soon after the purchase, the banking buccaneer decided the apartment wasn't big enough for him, his wife and three children, and promptly put it on the market unlived in. It sold last August for $5.2 million, at a 26 percent loss. But Mr. Eisman had the last laugh when he purchased a $7.4 million, four-bedroom, penthouse duplex across the street at 1120 Park Avenue—originally listed for $11.5 million! (He told The Times then of the transfer, "Just say that we are very happy.")

The 1125 Park apartment sold in this most recent transaction is the original Eisman home that the family of five lived in throughout the buying and selling bonanza. The Web site Streeteasy has no record of the apartment being listed, suggesting a quiet listing. Stribling agent Jo Parrish Hardin, who is one of the top listing agents in the building but who was not affiliated with this deal, agreed. "It's very possible he sold it to a friend, and, clearly, no broker was involved since it wasn't listed. It must have been a private transaction; people do that all the time."

Mr. Eisman's previous transactions have been handled by Gumley Haft Kleier president Michele Kleier, who could not comment on this sale. Mr. Eisman, mythologized in Michael Lewis' doomsday finance expose in Portfolio, also declined to comment.

cmalle@observer.com

Mr. Burger was talking about the third-quarter Manhattan housing reports from various brokerages that came out last week, and he didn't have much good to say about them. "They don’t separate out pre- and postwar architecture and there’s a huge difference between how those two perform in markets,” he said.

Mr. Burger is not alone in his view. While in years past the reports received lots of publicity—both in reporting the health of the Manhattan housing market and in their ability to create buzz—New York's top brokers echo his unfavorable sentiments. It's not that the reports are especially inaccurate or inartfully done; it's just that they're more for the folks at home and not for people who make a living in the market day-to-day.

"The reports are targeted at the consumer—it’s old news for brokers and forecasters, but it supports what we knew was happening,” said Sotheby’s broker Nikki Field. The statistics of the report are based in deals “which happened during the second quarter, but were finalized and transferred in the third,” said Ms. Field, who was the subject of The Observer's latest Sit-Down. "They are not the pulse of the market; those are the deals being negotiated today.”

Michele Kleier, a broker who runs her own firm, found that the reports don’t attest to the daily and weekly fluctuations in the market, affected by myriad factors including the volatile stock market. “I peruse them, but the truth is that I only care about my own business, and my own business changed radically in the last quarter,” she said. "With the stock market not having a good week, things can all change quickly. So I read them, but do I take them as gospel? No.”

It is true that brokers keep the reports around, usually to rattle off statistics to clients. Bruce Ehrmann, an executive vice president at Stribling, said that his team did review the reports in a meeting, but that they are “always lagging—real estate is always day-to-day, an almost ephemeral thing.”

Some buyers like to hear the numbers and past history, but it's not the most useful information for someone who's looking to buy or sell an apartment right now. A good broker will know actually useful and dynamic information: what's really going on with prices at a particular time, neighborhood, and type of property.

“They are not put out by people who are in the marketplace," Mr. Burger said, "but people who analyze the marketplace through computer screens."

editorial@observer.com

For more than four decades, the co-op at 27 East 65th Street-clad in its distinctive aqua-blue brick façade and affably known across Manhattan as the "Blue Brick Building"-cast a loud glow over the couture boutiques, storefronts and ladies lunching at outdoor cafés like La Goulue. But now, a nearly three-year-long renovation to the 17-story building to replace the glazed blue bricks with traditional red bricks is nearing completion. In a city that watches real estate with a laser-like intensity, the transformation of the blue brick building has unfolded as a uniquely New York saga shaped as much by market pressures and evolving aesthetics as by power struggles, bitter acrimony and legal wrangling. As the chromatic splash that long stood side-by-side among the 19th-century limestone façades of the Upper East Side soon disappears, real-estate watchers are now weighing in on a fading symbol of Manhattan's 1960's architecture.

"There's something innately inappropriate about a bright blue building in a neighborhood of brick and limestone," said Seri Worden, executive director of the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts. "But it had a lot of character. It's a building we sort of loved and hated."

"It did have some distinctiveness-I always appreciate buildings that are distinctive. We have a lot of homogenization in the neighborhood, and I would like to see the distinctiveness remain," said Charles Warren, the chair of Community Board 8. Although the blue brick building falls within the Upper East Side Historic District, the Landmarks Preservation Commission classifies the colored façade as "no style," lending no protection against its alteration.

"The board didn't have problems with the proposal to change the façade," Mr. Warren said of the board's unanimous 32-0 vote in support of the co-op's renovation in June 2002.

The blue brick building was born out of the reductionist architecture of the 1950's, when glazed white brick buildings came into vogue among the city's developers seeking to lure tenants with a signature look and cachet. As the architect J. Stanley Sharp put it at the time to The New York Times : "Color and beauty are desperately needed in our communities." In 1959, the developers Thomas Frouge and John Frouge commissioned the architect Anthony M. Pavia to build a $3 million apartment building on the northeast corner of 65th Street and Madison Avenue. His proposed design featured a blocky structure sheathed from top-to-bottom in glazed blue bricks.

"It was thought at the time that the blue represented a regal feeling, an uplifting feeling, opposed to traditional colors," said Anthony Pavia Jr., a retired real-estate developer in Stamford, Conn., and the son of the building's architect, who passed away in 2001. "At the time, there was a lot of white glazed brick around. Blue was selected to make it more distinctive."

The Brick Thrower

The building was completed in 1962 and joined a select group of blue brick buildings scattered across Manhattan's streetscape, from the apartment house designed by Yeshayahu Eshkar at 69 West 85th Street to the Carlton at 220 East 57th built in 1964 by the architect Joseph Riggio.

But in recent years, Pavia's glazed brick design became a flash point between the co-op's board and the building's commercial tenant, Elliot Sutton, when the two parties sparred over dueling lawsuits for the past two years during the renovation. In 2002, after the city cited the building for safety violations for failing to shore up the crumbling glazed brick façade (which had been weakened by rain water), the co-op board hired contractors to erect a scaffolding over the outside of the building and sought to finance the project with a $6.8 million mortgage. The building is operated as a 99-year land-lease, with Mr. Sutton controlling the 25,000-square-foot ground-floor commercial space that was the home of his restaurant Ferrier, and currently houses a 2,500 square-foot Fendi boutique, an Oliver Peoples eyewear store, a Citibank branch and a parking garage. Mr. Sutton objected to the proposed renovation, and as the parties jousted over the terms of the mortgage, the building languished behind scaffolding. Mr. Sutton said the prolonged construction forced him to shutter the doors of Ferrier in July; the restaurant had been open for 15 years.

"They never should have done the work. They could have repainted the bricks and spent $400,000 and not millions," Mr. Sutton said. "The blue never bothered me. I own the retail-I don't look up. But Oliver Peoples wanted to be in the building because of the blue bricks. I don't like the orangey brick they're putting up."

In late October, Mr. Sutton and attorneys representing the 55 co-op owners appeared at Manhattan Supreme Court on Centre Street before Judge Sherry Klein Heitler in the latest round of legal hearings over how long the scaffolding should remain.

"We're waiting for Mr. Sutton to stop with his lawsuits. The Department of Buildings has ordered that scaffolding put up for safety. It's up to the contractor to remove the scaffolding. They say December 2005; we won't agree to do it any sooner than that," said Gil Feder, an attorney at Reed Smith who is representing the co-op board.

Mr. Sutton said the scaffolding was sapping his ability to operate the retail space.

"We had to close Ferrier because no one could find the restaurant. If you make it 10 years in the restaurant business, you're an institution-and now it's over," he said. Mr. Sutton added that he now stands to lose $400,000 a year since the restaurant went under, and another $2 million a year in rent revenues after the Veritgo boutique closed earlier this year. "It's very difficult to rent the space with scaffolding blocking the street. It took them two and a half years thus far. How can you operate like that? It's a disaster. What kind of business can operate like that for years?"

Still, while white brick buildings today retain a patina of 1960's style, if not period character, the blue brick building on Madison Avenue never seemed at home among its monochromatic neighbors. Real-estate brokers, mindful of resale values, have championed the renovation.

"Blue was horrifying! That building, honestly, was an eyesore. Even from surrounding buildings, it wasn't pleasant to look at," said Michele Kleier, the president of Gumley Haft Kleier, who specializes in high-end Upper East Side properties. Several years ago, Ms. Kleier recalled, she had an exclusive on a three-bedroom apartment in the building that listed for $2 million, but couldn't find a buyer because of the blue brick façade.

"The apartment was completely renovated, but every person I showed it to said if it was in any other building, the space would sell right away. With the building changing color, the owners could now sell that same apartment for $3.5 million right away, or more.

"Replacing the façade with red brick is going to make everything in the building more sellable. When you get out of a car, there's a certain ambiance created immediately by the blue bricks. The whole feeling of Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue is prewar. The blue bricks were always out of place," Ms. Kleier said. "The truth is, it's a huge improvement not only for the building, but for the neighbors."

"I would say resale values will go up 10 percent now that they're changing colors," said Kirk Henckels, a senior vice president and director of Stribling Private Brokerage. "Prospective buyers didn't like the fact that it was blue. Everybody's happy it's changing colors. I think there's a blue brick building somewhere across the Henry Hudson Bridge-let it stay there."

And yet, the unflinching march of development that has buffed the city to a fine sheen has galvanized the guardians of the unique-albeit kitschy-buildings that once buoyed neighborhoods with their distinctive presence. From preservationists' pitched battles over Edward Durell Stone's modernist cube at 2 Columbus Circle to Greenwich Village residents resisting N.Y.U.'s concentric expansion out from Washington Square Park, some feel the passing of the blue brick building on Madison Avenue is just one more piece of New York's architecture fabric forever lost to the city's upscaling economic engine.

"I think the building was distinctive enough not to be garish; it was distinctive in that it set itself apart from the streetscape that you had in the neighborhood, and that is being lost," Mr. Pavia said of his father's design. "It'll be like any other building. But it's really inevitable-nothing lasts forever. The streetscape used to be unique, and now the block will be like anyplace else."

Tell that to WNBC-TV news anchor Michelle Marsh. A few years ago, just before real estate prices began their current fin de siècle bloat, Ms. Marsh put her penthouse at the Century, a condominium at 25 Central Park West, up for sale. With two floors, each with a terrace, three bedrooms and a library, it was listed at what, in retrospect, was the bargain price of $2.4 million. But in the mid-90's doldrums, it wasn't moving. That was until, as Ms. Marsh's broker remembered it, "a very nice young man in his late 30's … a lovely banker-type dresser" who "spoke very nicely" and "dropped names" was brought to the duplex by a respectable broker at Ambrose Mar-Elia Company. The buyer said he was from Texas, had a trust fund held by Goldman, Sachs & Company, and was anxious to close the deal because he had been outbid on a SoHo penthouse. "He wanted to move right along," said Ms. Marsh's broker, who asked that she not be named. The broker found the buyer a real estate lawyer, and the buyer's offer was accepted. He signed a contract, pulled out his checkbook and scribbled out his 10 percent deposit. He then went home and stopped payment on the check.

Confronted by the broker, he wrote another, which also bounced. He didn't pay the lawyer, and he stopped returning calls. Ms. Marsh, the three-time Emmy Award-winning newscaster, had been had by one of a new breed that is cropping up more and more in the upper reaches of the real estate market: the house-hunting impostor. A month of Ms. Marsh's time had been wasted, and she's far from alone.

"I think it's like a sickness, an illness," said Sharon Baum, a broker at the Corcoran Group, who said that in a recent week, she had to ward off three separate imaginary billionaires who pretended they were contenders to buy the much publicized, $30 million house at 11 East 62nd Street. "When you have trophy properties like these, they really pull out the scammers."

Ms. Baum said there are two kinds of fake buyers. First are the delusionally bored: "People who do it because it's better than sitting in McDonald's sipping a cup of coffee all day," she said. "Instead, you get treated royally and get to see a property."

And then there are the "scam artists," she said, who have some devious plan to try to get as much out of appearing to be buying the property as they can. "You're trying to make one deal seem so real and use that to attract another deal," explained Ms. Baum. "They'll often want a letter of intent. And I'll say, 'You have it backwards, because the letter of intent should come from you.'"

Scammers tend to hit condos and town houses, which, unlike co-ops, require less information up front.

Smooth-talking and exacting in their facsimile of a real, live rich person, they bamboozle the brokers into driving them around town-often in rented cars-and giving them tours of places they couldn't otherwise do much more than deliver groceries to. Occasionally, the con goes further, and the owners end up dickering over terms with them.

Ms. Baum said she thinks she's "pretty aware of the different ploys by now." But brokers keep on bringing them in: "They want it to be true," Ms. Baum said. "Hope springs eternal." Especially for a 3 to 5 percent commission on 30 million bucks. And judging between a real millionaire and a fake is not always easy. "Obviously, you don't want to dismiss someone," cautioned Ms. Baum. "That would be a mistake."

And while most people with the wealth to buy a $30 million house are reasonably well known, Sotheby's International Realty broker John Golden points out, "You never know. It could be a rich peanut farmer."

Most brokers who have dealt in high-end properties have had a particularly rankling time-waster in their past. "It happens every day of the week," said one broker, who just washed his hands of a customer who claimed he had $3 million to spend on a penthouse in midtown, an apartment that the broker described as "one of the best apartments that I've ever seen, with double-height ceilings and a curving stairway."

"He put in an offer but couldn't even afford the maintenance on the place," said the broker of the fantasy shopper. The broker pulled the plug on the deal when he found out that the delusional buyer's plan was to get his father to pay for it-he just hadn't informed Dad of the idea. "Otherwise, who knows how far he would have taken it," said the broker. "It's entertainment and fun for people to go around and look at big, expensive apartments."

Another broker remembered a summer in the mid-90's when she escorted a "fat Englishman" and his "young black companion," who were staying in one of the Upper East Side's boutique hotels, around to "every house in town." Restricting their search to "the major town houses," such as the limestone Cartier mansion at 15 East 92nd Street, the broker recalled sweating through several days of often un-air-conditioned home tours. The Englishman, who was garroted into his navy suit by a Hermès tie, could not always make it up the stairs, and would send his companion up to check things out.

"But nothing was elaborate enough," she said. "I must have shown him at least six houses. Then I started to ignore him."

Why did she show him anything in the first place? "When someone wants to see the biggest things, you kind of give it a shot," she said.

Around the same time, Michele Conte, a high-end condominium specialist at Brown Harris Stevens Residential Sales, was the on-site sales manager for the conversion of 1049 Fifth Avenue. Another broker had been contacted by what Ms. Conte understood to be a hot new rap band, and the broker was chauffeuring the hip-hoppers around town, looking for a "phat crib" for their front man. "They were all like real rappers," Ms. Conte remembered, while admitting that none of the sales staff or brokers were exactly in the target demographics for Yo! MTV Raps . "They came in with the clothes and a guy they said was their manager … We really liked them. They were just so playful."

They liked the look of a 5,000-square-foot, $5.5 million apartment on the 20th floor. "They came back twice and made a bid," Ms. Conte said. "When I asked for verification of finances, they disappeared." Instead, Rush Limbaugh bought the place.

Most impostors evaporate when it comes time to talk money. "You can't really be defrauded," said Ms. Conte, "because they can't go through with it. All they can do is waste your time." But a charismatic fake buyer will try to keep the game going with a bait-and-switch, always thinking of ways to not close on one property and to roll the search over to the next one.

Michele Kleier, president of Gumley Haft Kleier Inc., had one of those two summers ago. "She came in a stretch limousine," she said of a woman who called up after having seen a 10,000-square-foot house at 11 East 82nd Street on the cover of Unique Homes magazine.

"When she first called me, she said, 'This is Xi-Xi, but that's not my real name,'" said Ms. Kleier. The woman said she was the wife of a very wealthy man from Monaco who had been recently decapitated in a boating accident-although, Xi-Xi confided, she herself believed it was murder. Hence the secrecy. Things were slow that summer, so Ms. Kleier decided she'd go along for the ride.

Xi-Xi was a plump, 30-ish, casually dressed woman who was living at a suite at the Hilton in Short Hills, N.J. When she came into the city, it was always with her mother, decked out in Versace, and her son. The limo was driven by a "very scary" gun-toting driver, said Ms. Kleier, who added that Xi-Xi "was always stopping at Cartier or Harry Winston to get a $10,000 ring." The shop owners seemed to know her. As it turned out, Xi-Xi concluded that the East 82nd Street house, which Ronald Perelman eventually bought for $10 million as a corporate apartment for one of his executives, wasn't right for her. "She wanted a garage," said Ms. Kleier. Xi-Xi decided that what she really wanted was Lady Fairfax's apartment on top of the Pierre hotel. It's got a ballroom, 360-degree views and a $28 million price tag. "She had done all her research," said Ms. Kleier, "and knew all about Lady Fairfax," whom Xi-Xi claimed to know socially. Meanwhile, said Ms. Kleier, the Fairfax family "checked out her story and decided that she was the heir of the Mars fortune," based on what they saw as a similarity between Xi-Xi's life story and that of a Mars heir.

But then Xi-Xi wiggled out of the Pierre deal, explaining, said Ms. Kleier, that she "didn't want to buy a co-op because she didn't want to ask her friends for social references." On to a $15 million horse farm in Dutchess County, which actually went to contract. But then Xi-Xi made an impossible demand-that the current residents and their horses be out in a month, so she could have a Fourth of July party-which ended that deal. A country retreat in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., also didn't work out. This went on for months until, finally, Xi-Xi became fixated on a house on the corner of 64th Street and Park Avenue with a $12 million bounty. (It remains unsold today.) "She was faxing power of attorneys back and forth to Monaco," remembered Ms. Kleier. But then Xi-Xi told Ms. Kleier she was uncomfortable wiring money into New York banks because they would want to know where the money came from, and Xi-Xi wanted that to be a secret. She told Ms. Kleier that maybe she would have her secretary bring the cash in a suitcase. Then she disappeared, leaving thousands of dollars of unpaid bills at the Hilton, where she apparently was pleading wire transfer difficulties in lieu of paying her bills, too.

"Everybody believed her," said Ms. Kleier. "To this day, I don't know what she got out of this."

"Not that it wasn't fun," she added. "I got to see a lot of pretty properties outside of the city that I wouldn't have otherwise seen." And Xi-Xi's mystery driver even dropped off some exotic imported two-tone roses on Ms. Kleier's birthday.

"You can't be too jaded," said Ms. Kleier of her experience, "because there is a chance that it is for real."

Brokers have created a loose portrait of the serial bluffer. The impostor, said Ms. Conte, usually has perfected the persona of a very rich and powerful person, "busy, authoritative, connected," while often genuinely wealthy people don't look that impressive. Brokers say they watch out for name-dropping and a cavalier heedlessness about money: Truly rich folks tend to be a bit cheap. And the fakers "only call for the most expensive properties," said Mr. Golden, who said he had a woman who sounded "very cultured and rich" try to pay $14 million for an East Hampton estate over the phone a couple of years ago. Another warning sign: outlandish requirements. Mr. Golden's phone-in customer wanted a helipad and bulletproof glass around the pool. Other red flags: P.O. boxes and middle-class telephone exchanges. And always call back to check the number to make sure it's not a pay phone or a prison.

And, said Ms. Baum, "They always give you much more information than you need or want to know." One of her faux customers for the East 62nd Street house had a well-rehearsed spiel about how he was selling his business because his children weren't interested in it. "I was thinking, I didn't ask him any of this," Ms. Baum said.

Then there is the tricky question of the big-name shopper: Sometimes a celebrity will send out other people to check out the properties first, to avoid ending up in the New York Post 's Page Six column. Back in the late 1980's, Ms. Conte had a man who claimed to be a son of Jack Warner, the late founder of the Warner Brothers movie studio, who said he was interested in spending $5 million to combine two apartments she had for sale at 60 East 88th Street. She met him at a restaurant in the theater district with his broker; he had a regular table and was addressed as "Mr. Warner" by the maître d'. Ms. Conte drew up preliminary architectural plans and showed them to him. "I want to go to contract as soon as possible," he told her.

Then the morning they were set to meet to put things in order, he never showed up, and his broker never heard from him again.

"I'll never forget that he took me to lunch once with my 16-year-old daughter," said Ms. Conte. "And she said to me, 'I don't think he can afford this.' I said, 'Why?' She said, 'He's wearing a polyester jacket.'"

Three years later, Ms. Conte said, she spotted "Mr. Warner" at the bar of a restaurant on Sixth Avenue and asked him what happened to him. He stammered something like, "Uh, I had to get back to the coast." Ms. Conte noticed he was wearing the same polyester jacket.

Indeed, scammers tend not to skip town. Jackie Vincent, a broker at Halstead Property Company, had a buyer interested in a $2.75 million apartment at Museum Tower. He said he was "traveling a lot during the week … all over the world," said Ms. Vincent. The man, an overweight, often sweaty man in his 50's, would drop into town, leaving a puddle of innuendo and dropped names in his wake: He was going to a hockey game in Canada with the Bronfmans. He'd just sold a $15 million home abroad. He was going to use Henry Kissinger as a reference. "I worked with him on and off for eight or nine months," said Ms. Vincent. "There was something about him that just charmed people."

She realized they weren't going anywhere when "we had two or three accepted offers" and then he'd pull out. He never paid his lawyer for drawing up his contracts. "He was a total, total fraud," Ms. Vincent said. Since then, she's found out more about him, and even met a few women who dated him. "He's actually still in New York. I see him on the street sometimes; he doesn't acknowledge me. He's very ill. He's a very ill man."

To guard against fraudulent shoppers, brokers are often requiring a letter from a bank saying they are sufficiently rich. But even that hasn't stopped some. "I had one last week, and guess where the banking reference was? A bank in Liechtenstein," said Ms. Baum, disgusted.

Scammers often can't seem to help themselves. The impostor who took Michelle Marsh for a ride actually tried to do it to her again. This time, the incorrigible fraud was represented by the brokerage Douglas Elliman, which Ms. Marsh also had switched to after her previous debacle. The broker who had the exclusive on her place then, Jeff Rothstein, was listening to an office mate tell him about an exciting new customer, "a wealthy businessman" who was "really secretive" and who wanted exactly what Ms. Marsh was trying to unload. As they were talking, Mr. Rothstein realized, "It just sounded so familiar." He realized it was the same guy who had done this to Ms. Marsh the first time, circling back.

It doesn't always end so benignly. One broker recalled a Texan who was trying to do a $2 million combination of units in the just completed Museum Tower. He would fly into town, check into the Plaza Hotel and show up to look at apartments in a limo with his Texas girlfriend-"a real trophy young blonde," said the broker. On the day of the closing, the broker stood on West 53rd Street in a downpour waiting for the Texan, but he never showed. A few days later, the jilted broker got a call from the girlfriend, who was by herself at the Plaza and didn't know anyone else in New York. The girlfriend said that her boyfriend had told her to quit her job, fly to New York and check into the Plaza, which she had done on her own credit card. She had been there for three days, waiting, with no sign of the boyfriend.

The broker told her to go home.

On Jan. 30, 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley ticked off $950,000 for a 1.75-acre tract in the woodlands of Northwest Harbor-that's "north of the highway" and away from the beach, for those concerned with such issues. He bought the empty lot from Jonathan Canno, the former chairman of Equitable Bag Company (a 79-year-old shopping bag corporation) who is better known out on the East End for being on the board of the Hamptons International Film Festival and a founding board member of the American Foundation for AIDS Research than as the man behind the Bloomingdale's Medium Brown Bag.

Mr. Canno bought the land in 1987 for $315,000. According to Hamptons real estate watchers, he'd intended to build a house on the property, which has about 250 feet of water frontage. Instead, he bought and restored an 1867 house south of the highway and let his grassy lot sit fallow. And now, thanks to Mr. Bradley, it's harvest time.

The land is in an area known as the Settlement at Northwest Harbor, which is little traveled by the Peggy Siegal set. In fact, the closest celebrity is probably Donna Karan, who's also camped out in the woods north of the highway, but Mr. Bradley and Ms. Karan are far from being neighbors.

"It was previously undesirable," said one local of the area. "It's not what people think of when they think the Hamptons: the rolling potato fields … But that's all been ruined, anyway."

Mr. Bradley and his earring were probably after the privacy up there, even if he's now a Hamptons owner, like his co-workers Steve Kroft and Don Hewitt. Through a spokesman, Mr. Bradley had no comment.

215 East 72nd Street

Three-bed, three-bath, 2,700-square-foot prewar co-op.

Asking: $1.395 million. Selling: $1.35 million.

Maintenance: $2,425.07; 30 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: one day.

WE'LL TAKE THE APARTMENT … AND OUR DAUGHTER WANTS TO BID ON YOUR SON

"It's been in a lot of magazines," said interior designer Mary Meeham (left, with her son, actor William McNamara) of this apartment, which she lived in for 17 years and decorated three times. "It's been in Architectural Digest twice … Redbook for a Christmas issue … some Japanese magazine that I can't even remember the name of. And the living room was in Harper's Bazaar , but the article was really about me." Her designs for Jimmy Buffett's porch-bedecked, dog-and-kid-friendly new Sag Harbor house, screenwriter William Goldman's apartment in the Carlyle Towers and a former home of Jay McInerney have also been written up. But it wasn't just the apartment's professional taste-maker burnish that impressed buyers. "When people saw her son's picture on the wall, they'd say, 'Is this her son?'" said Ms. Meeham's broker, Patricia Burnham. Broker Michele Kleier, who brought the winning bidder in that first day, said her "eligible daughter" has had a crush on Mr. McNamara since she'd seen him opposite Jodie Foster in Stealing Home . She told Ms. Burnham, "I'll sell this apartment if you'll introduce him to my daughter." ("It really did motivate me to sell the apartment," Ms. Kleier said.) And she did. Then Ms. Meeham didn't much want to leave the place, but she realized how much other people wanted her to go. "I had someone in the building who was willing to pay $100,000 to break up the deal," Ms. Meeham said. "He'd gotten $1.6 [million] for his, and he wanted mine because it was bigger." But she didn't undo the original deal. Nor did she kick in her son. Broker: Patricia S. Burnham Inc. (Patricia Burnham); Gumley Haft Kleier Inc. (Michele Kleier).

1 East 62nd Street

One-bed, one-bath, 900-square-foot prewar condo.

Asking: $590,000. Selling: $590,000.

Charges: $980. Taxes: $460.

Time on the market: three months.

HEMINGWAY'S WAR ROOM

"Hemingway lived there," said broker Art Irwin of this 1890 mansion-carved-into-apartments. "Maybe in this apartment, or maybe in the one above it.… It's where he wrote 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro.'" The house was built for railroad magnate Samuel Spencer. He was a Confederate soldier and a friend of J.P. Morgan; he died in 1906. His widow donated the house to Columbia University, which cut it into apartments in 1930 and then sold them off as condos in 1986. (There's still a picture of her in the lobby. "She looks a bit like Evita Peron," reports Mr. Irwin.) The apartment that was just sold is in the rear of the building, affording a view of the neighbor's slate roofs and a courtyard owned by a nearby foundation. There's a fireplace and 14-foot ceilings, but it's not a grandiose space (the apartments in the house's old public rooms in the front are fancier). "It's open, quiet and reasonably sunny," said Mr. Irwin. The place was something of a wallflower for a few months, but in the end there was a bidding war. You heard the broker: Papa slept here. Broker: Halstead Property Company (Art Irwin).

1 West 72nd Street (Dakota)

One-bed, one-bath, 1,150-square-foot prewar co-op.

Asking: $750,000. Selling: $725,000.

Maintenance: $2,695; 49 percent tax-deductible

Time on the market: four years.

LUCKILY, THE PRESIDENT'S ALREADY BEEN BY ASKING FOR MONEY

For all you students of the Dakota, this apartment sits in the upper-left-hand corner of the building when you look at it from Central Park. Inside, because it's on the top residential floor, "you can see some of the curves of the roof line" in addition to the park, the broker explained. It is still the most popularly celebrated apartment building in the city. (Even if Graydon Carter has abandoned ship for Bank Street, Yoko Ono's still there, and don't forget Maury Povich and Connie Chung, Lauren Bacall and The Observer 's own Rex Reed.) "Boris Karloff used to live there," said broker Kevin Rusty of this apartment. Since the Dakota is divided into four quadrants, there's only one other apartment on the floor. And the building is busy bringing the flues up to current building codes, at which point this apartment will have a wood-burning fireplace again. The sellers put the apartment on the market four years ago, but were in no hurry. The price has fluctuated as they have wavered on whether to sell or not. Architectural and pop-cultural significance notwithstanding, the sellers got serious when they found a lot more space: They've moved to a five-story town house on the Upper East Side. Broker: Bellmarc Realty (Kevin Rusty); Ashforth Warburg Associates.