Bring on the offers. (Property Shark)

For almost a year now, Upper East Side brokers have been falling all over themselves to win the right to sell mysterious mining heiress Huguette Clark's massive Fifth Avenue spread, with its 42 rooms and estimated price tag of $60 million to $70 million. Well, the battle is over, and now that people have actually seen the place, they are not sure it is worth quite so much. Who's to blame? Those pesky co-op boards, of course.

Brown Harris Stevens broker Nancy Franklin is the lucky lady selling the Clark estate at 907 Fifth Avenue, the Post reports, which pegs the possible price tag as high as $100 million, though the tab quickly revises that downward.

However, insiders tell The Post the property is really estimated to be worth around $45 million to $60 million because the space consists of three unconnected apartments and the ultra-strict co-op board has not yet ruled on whether or not the two Clark apartments on the eighth floor can be joined. Brokers said the eighth-floor apartments could fetch a total between $20 million and $35 million. Combined, they’d be worth more.

“It’s a great opportunity to own more than 10,000 square feet on Fifth Avenue,” one source who has walked through the units says.

There’s also a 12th-floor apartment that could be priced around $25 million.

An original floorplan—so much space!

The decision has been a long time coming, in part because of accusations that Clark's old attorney and accountant may have mishandled her money, which caused the millionairess' distant relatives to sue—hoping to get a cut, of course. The pair and her nurse were recently suspended from the estate, leading to the appointment of Ms. Franklin.

Whether the place commands a marquee price will be interesting to see. The board is loath to combine the units, yes, but a big sale would boost their own property values. And with the luxury market still booming, it seems reasonable that someone looking to make a statement would be willing to plop down some serious cash here. Such tough decisions on the Upper East Side.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Greenman, spelling champion.

The contestants represented New York’s spelling elite. Many of them had whole careers’ worth of spelling behind them, elevated reputations and steady salaries underpinned by the public’s faith in their agility with words.

Now, sitting in two rows before an audience on the third floor of the Standard Hotel, wearing comically large name tags and sparkly bumblebee antennae that bobbled gently as they fidgeted, they awaited the bloodletting. While this particular group might be upstaged by the children on ESPN every year, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Annual Spelling Bee fundraiser is nevertheless a very serious affair.

Ira Silverberg, the dapper silver-tongued literary agent from Sterling Lord Literistic, was the evening’s host. The judge was Jesse Sheidlower, a man whose pinstriped suit, severely trimmed hair and rimless glasses might have passed as a dictionary-editor Halloween costume, if he were not already editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Warming up the crowd, which had just come from a silent auction, Mr. Silverberg asked his co-host what new words would be coming out in the next edition.

“I’m not on the new words team,” said Mr. Sheidlower, flustered.

“Just give us something from the street.”

“Well, the Concise Oxford Dictionary did add ‘sexting,’” he said, then blushed.

The first contestant at the microphone was Jonathan Burnham, the British-born publisher of HarperCollins described by Mr. Silverberg as “a talented pianist, owner of two dogs and a fantastic speller.” Mr. Burnham fulfilled expectations with a flawless execution of the word “reliquary.”

Nancy Franklin, the recently departed television critic of The New Yorker, came next.

“So,” said Mr. Silverberg. “Did you quit your job?”

“I did!” said Ms. Franklin. “I’m leaving my job to not write. I’ve worked for The New Yorker for 33 years.”

“So you started at age 12?” said the charming host.

Her word: “Genealogical.”

“Oh Jesus,” she said, but then rattled it off without error.

The first elimination, however, was not long in coming.

“James Frey!” crooned Mr. Silverberg. “You publishing provocateur! You don’t even write the books, you get kids to write them at the YMCA.” Mr. Frey’s word was “commissariat.”

“It’s going to be a first round exit this year,” he said, sighing. He was right.

The novelist Julia Glass spelled “commissariat” correctly, then Ben Greenman, an editor at The New Yorker, powered through “nacreous” (“made of or resembling mother-of-pearl”). The novelist Bernice McFadden succumbed to “strychnine,” then Francine Prose, David Rakoff and Elissa Schappell all fell afoul of “antecedence,” which most spelled as some variation of “antecedents.” Only Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand finally chose the correct homonym.

“Oh, Simon Winchester,” said Mr. Silverberg to the next contestant, the British author of Krakatoa. “Fancy-schmancy! You’ve always had this posh thing. I like that.” Mr. Winchester poshly spelled “asseverate.”

Thereafter, the casualties came quickly. Meg Wolitzer, author of The Uncoupling, went out on “uncrystallized;” Ms. Simonson fell to “aardwolf;” and Mr. Winchester to “virgule.” Ms. Glass spelled “chary” as “charry.” Both Patricia Marx and Bob Morris misspelled “opprobrium” (although Mr. Morris earned Mr. Silverberg’s opprobrium when he hinted that the host, also Mr. Morris’s husband, would soon be leaving his job at Sterling Lord to a destination as yet unknown). O books editor Sara Nelson succumbed to “wantonness.” Lynne Tillman proved ignorant of “ignoramus.” Finally only Ms. Franklin, Ms. Burnham, and Mr. Greenman remained. The death knell was “pyrosis” or heartburn, which both Mr. Burnham and Ms. Franklin spelled with two “r”s. Mr. Greenman asked for language of origin: Latin. Victory!

Wearing a paper crown decorated with pipecleaners and shaped like a large golden bee and clutching his new copy of the OED, Mr. Greenman looked underwhelmed by his win. “I won before, in 2009,” he said.

Earlier in the evening he had been handing out a small flier for the Occupy Alphabet movement, which read “Why do the top six letters in our alphabet use more than 50 percent of the available space in all spelling? It hardly seems fair.”

Asked if he was a whiz speller as a child, Mr. Greenman said he preferred math. As for his strategy of always asking for the language of origin (including on the word “kibbutznik,” which drew a laugh), Mr. Greenman said, “I just like stalling.”

The next morning, however, Mr. Greenman sent us an e-mail. “I dreamed about spelling, sort of,” he wrote. “I was in some kind of banquet hall and I needed to use the restroom and the doors had M and W on them and the letters were kind of important, there, in the dream. Normally you just find the right one and push on through but I think I had the alphabet on my mind.”

(from The New Yorker)

Nancy Franklin announced that she is stepping down from her position as New Yorker television critic on Twitter today.

"I've been a critic for 18 years, and a TV critic for 13 of them. That's a lot of sitting alone indoors playing with one's equipment," Ms. Franklin wrote the Observer in an e-mail.

"I wanted to get out of the routine of writing a regular column and to get away from writing itself, at least for a while. It's a good move,and I'm just stupid enough not to be worried that I don't know what I'm going to do next," she added.

Despite the bittersweet tone, New Yorker editor David Remnick is confident she'll be back.

"I fully expect she’ll be back, but not about television," Mr. Remnick, a television fan himself, told the Observer. "There is no law that says once you're a television critic you must be one forever."

As for who will take over the On Television column, he had fewer expectations.

"We'll look around," he said. "Who knows? I'm doing what you do. I'm reading."

Ms. Franklin will do two more columns, he added. (Please, Ms. Franklin, do New Girl!)

She joined the New Yorker typing pool in 1978 and over the next decade climbed the ranks to nonfiction editor. She became a theater critic under Tina Brown and has been television critic since 1998.

First up, Vanity Fair, which enlisted The Times' Maureen Dowd to profile Ms. Fey, whom the magazine's cover trumpets as "A New American Sweetheart!" (Punctuation theirs.) The magazine's Web site also features one of those behind-the-scenes videos of Ms. Fey's photo shoot that all magazines' Web Editors are convinced Internet users love. (In an example of too-weird-to -ignore/too-geeky-to -explicate life imitating art, a very Maureen Dowd-like character played by Christine Lahti once wrote a profile of the protagonists' of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a show, like Ms. Fey's 30 Rock, set behind the scenes of a sketch comedy show very much like Ms. Dowd's launchpad, Saturday Night Live.)

Ms. Dowd's story was dutifully picked up by The Daily News, The New York Post (whose Page Six also had an item about Ms. Fey today), and The Associated Press, and TMZ. (Apparently a lot of people have been wondering why Ms. Fey has a scar on her face.)

Also out today, The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin's take on Ms. Fey's show, about which she writes:

Ms. Franklin also manages to get a quick shot in at Ms. Fey's former 'Weekend Update' co-anchor Jimmy Fallon, whom she calls "a comic nonentity" who "will inexplicably take over the plum Conan O’Brien spot on NBC when O’Brien prematurely takes over the 'Tonight Show' from Jay Leno next year."

Any minute now, we expect The Daily Beast's Tina Brown to call for Ms. Fey to host Meet the Press or become a part of President-elect Obama's cabinet.

Her verdict?

Not super!

"Couric's interpretation of the role of anchor led her to repress the qualities that drew people to her in the first place, and she often comes across as hollow and robotic," writes Ms. Franklin. "I'm never as aware that anybody is reading from a teleprompter as I am when I'm watching Couric."

More from the review:

And like a teenage Donald Trump, neither real numbers nor, apparently, critical success can stand in her way.