If $19 million doesn’t sound like a bargain, consider that the townhouse was listed last spring for $26.8 million, before being reduced to $24 million. It was at that asking price that the seller, Dr. Samuel Mandel, accepted the 43-year-old Mr. Pérez Dávila’s offer, giving him more than a 20 percent discount on the six-floor townhouse with 20 rooms and half as many fireplaces.

Dr. Mandel, who had owned the house for 24 years, had retired from his dermatology practice, which was located in the mansion’s ground floor and basement. When the offices were open, he and wife Annette lived in an owner’s triplex above, and rented out a duplex penthouse with two terraces. For the last nine years, though, Dr. Mandel had leased the ground floor to the gallerist Keith de Lellis, who specialized in vintage photography; last year he vacated the space.

“The whole house is going to be totally renovated, top to bottom, by whoever bought it, into a single-family,” said the listing broker, Prudential Douglas Elliman senior vice president Peter Schwartz. City records and confirmation from a source with knowledge of the deal established Mr. Pérez Dávila as the buyer.

The buyer and his architect didn’t return calls to their offices. As for Dr. and Mrs. Mandel, the sales deed puts their new address in America’s dermatologic Shangri-La—Florida.

Mr. Schwartz said his favorite slice of the house is the 18-foot-high parlor floor, with paneled library and ballroom. “There were wood-burning fireplaces in both—and, you know, the mantels were about six feet high,” said the broker. “Very large fireplaces!”

Almost everything in the 12,000-square-foot house is very large and very old.

The house was designed in 1906 by the architectural firm of Adams & Warren for the Sparrow family; it was praised by the American Institute of Architects for its “bold Italian Renaissance detail.” The A.I.A. calls it the Ruth Hill Beard house for one of its more famous tenants: the daughter of James J. Hill, the railroad baron dubbed the “Empire Builder” in his day, and the widow of tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard. She later married into the Heidsieck champagne family.

There is little in the “elevator townhouse” that can’t be restored. Drop ceilings in places, for instance, were built with the aim of keeping the original ceiling details intact above them.

“The building wasn’t renovated since 1985—well, the top duplex was renovated,” said Mr. Schwartz.

“It’s going to be gorgeous, I’ll tell you,” he added. “Peter Marino is doing it, I believe, if you know who he is? Probably one of the most celebrated designers in the residential field.”

What will Mr. Marino do with the place? The architect who credits Andy Warhol with giving him his start has worked on projects as historic as the restorations of the Palazzo Sernagiotto in Venice and the Ascott House in England, which is registered with the National Trust, and the Fendi flagship on Fifth Avenue, as well as a Louis Vuitton boutique in Hong Kong, where a solid stone stairway has glass treads with built-in L.E.D. panels that play videos underfoot.

“Whatever was there is insignificant, because it’s all going to be ripped out anyway. The only sure thing is that the rooms are large, the ceilings are high, and there’s very ornate original detail—which will be kept.”

How much does that cost? “I’ve never renovated one of these things,” the broker said. “It depends on how over-the-top you want to be. You can spend as much as you spent on the house.”

Crazy Like a Fuchs

The flipping has already begun at 50 Gramercy Park North. And the developers themselves are leading the charge.

The chic condo development was built in conjunction with the redevelopment of that next-door dowager, the Gramercy Park Hotel, by a development team that included hotelier Ian Schrager and real-estate developers Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs.

Mr. Fuchs, who himself invested in an eighth-floor sponsor unit at 50 Gramercy Park North for $9,062,400, has now put the apartment back on the market with a $5.5 million mark-up.

Mr. Fuchs, who through his partnership with Mr. Rosen in RFR Realty owns the Lever House and the Seagram Building, is asking $14.5 million for the place now; that’s still $1.5 million less than the building’s penthouse is asking, even though Mr. Fuchs’ unit has more square feet.

Corcoran senior vice president Dennis Mangone is listing the full-floor, 4,710-square-foot place, but he would not comment for this story.

According to Mr. Mangone’s listing, the apartment has a 75-foot-long park view, which stretches nearly uninterrupted from the master suite to the dining room to the “great room.”

That great room has 12.4-foot-high ceilings (like the library) and a wood-burning fireplace (like the big bedroom, or the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel.)

Better yet, the apartment comes with a key to the menacingly elite neighborhood park.

Wilf Family Sells at Chatham for $7.2 M.

The Wilf family, a formidable New Jersey–based real-estate clan, has sold its nine-room apartment at the Chatham on East 65th Street for $7.2 million.

Orin Wilf, a principal of the family’s development firm Garden Homes, said that the 29th-floor condo belonged to his late grandmother. She passed away last year.

According to city records, the buyers are David George, a former Goldman Sachs senior director and chief financial officer, and his wife Verna. They’re upgrading from an apartment five floors down, which cost $5.35 million in 2003.

The Georges’ new place is loftier.

“It had a beautiful view from the living room of Central Park,” said Mr. Wilf. Plus, the dining room faces the East River, and the master bedroom has park views too.

“I got to be honest with you—I wasn’t looking out the window,” Mr. Wilf said when asked about the vistas. “I was spending time with my grandmother.”

Real-estate family men are good to family! Mr. Wilf said he visited “maybe three or four times a week.”

His grandmother was married to the late Harry Wilf, who co-founded Garden Homes in 1955. His firm developed suburban housing—and lots of shopping centers— eventually expanding into Manhattan, and out west and in Israel, too. (They’re a sporty bunch: Wilfs own the Minnesota Vikings and have a small stake in the Yankees.)

The family bought the 65th Street condo new in 2001, though it isn’t clear from city records how much they paid.

“We chose the Chatham because it was a middle ground between my father’s apartment and my apartment,” Orin said. (His dad is Leonard Wilf, yet another big real-estate man). “We both live on the Upper East Side.”

The Wilfs, despite their suburban roots, know a bit about newfangled condo buildings: They developed 170 East End Avenue.

“You know, we knew that Related was capable of building a good building,” said Mr. Wilf, referring to the Chatham’s developer. “My father had a relationship with Stephen Ross”—the billionaire C.E.O. of Related—“and it was a very nice building.”

In August, Corcoran senior vice president Lauren Muss listed the Chatham apartment. “It’s kind of a Park Avenue condo on Third Avenue,” she said about the building.

Why? “The staff is great, and the ceilings are 10 feet high, and the floors are herringbone.”

“I’ve become the queen of the Chatham,” said Ms. Muss, when asked about her several listings there. She didn’t concoct her title: “Actually, that was Orin’s quote.”

"I got so many offers, and it was so confusing," he said of the wavering though still strong real-estate market of earlier this year.

But he was never able to shake hands on a deal to sell the seven-story mansion, which was all but filled with tenants: a renter in the residential duplex on the top two floors; the Keith De Lellis photography gallery on the parlor floor; and his former dermatology practice, which his son had taken over, on the ground level. Dr. Mandel and his wife vacated their own triplex apartment in the building when they moved to Delray Beach, Fla., two years ago.

"People would make offers, and I would never hear from them again," said Dr. Mandel, who opted not to hire a broker to sell the house.

After a few of the offers were withdrawn just as he moved to accept them, and after he began to sense that high-priced properties all around him were just sitting on the market, Dr. Mandel decided to contact a Chicago-based real-estate auction company, Sheldon Good, about selling the house. No stranger himself to auctions for antiques and art, Dr. Mandel said, "I didn't see why real estate should be any different."

In Manhattan, however, where the real-estate market is so sensitive, real-estate auctions are rare and are usually perceived as fire sales. Sotheby's International Holdings Inc. and Christie's International, the biggest New York auctioneers for luxury goods-both of which now have real-estate brokerage divisions-rarely sell homes this way. Sotheby's has held only three real-estate auctions since its formation in 1989, and Christie's, whose real-estate brokerage division was formed in 1995, has held only one.

But Sheldon Good has auctioned everything from hotels in New Jersey to timber forests in Chile. Over the last five years, according to Steve Good, president of the company, more and more New York–area sellers of super-pricey properties have held auctions to call all the buyers in at once, guaranteeing a sale if the reserve price is met.

This summer, Sheldon Good was representing what's often called "the Daisy Buchanan estate," Lands End in Sands Point, Long Island. The house-where F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have written parts of The Great Gatsby, and which is said to have inspired the fictional home of Daisy Buchanan-went on the market on July 20 for $50 million. When it didn't sell, racehorse owner Virginia Kraft Payson hired Sheldon Good to auction the house this fall. (After Sept. 11, the auction has been put off until the spring.)

Auctions can get a better price for rare properties, said Mr. Good. "Where price is not easily determined through some conventional analysis, [sellers ask] 'At what price point [do I] settle?' If you can easily value the house, an auction probably doesn't make sense-but after a long time on the market, rather than gradually reducing the price, an auction can make a lot of sense."

Dr. Mandel's house, whose "bold Italian Renaissance detail" is pointed out in the American Institute of Architects' guide to New York City, was built in 1906 by the

architectural firm of Adams & Warren. The house was taken over in 1955 by the National Municipal League, a nonprofit

organization formed by Louis Brandeis. When the Mandel family bought the place in 1981 for $592,000, they spent five years transforming the upper floors into two residential units-the triplex, with most of the turn-of-the-century details intact, and the duplex, in a more contemporary vein.

Dr. Mandel hopes to sell to a family or perhaps an embassy, but considers it likely that renovations will be extensive, making the price of the place even harder to figure.

In the meantime, Dr. Mandel had the building vacated two months ago, and for a month the place is playing host to the seventh annual American Hospital of Paris French Designer Showhouse. For $20 (with a reservation in advance), New Yorkers can tour the house and see the designers-and benefit this Paris-based hospital that is also a co-sponsor of the Sept. 11th Fund. The decorators include Angela Hemingway, who designed a den in memory of her late husband Jack, son of Ernest.

Dr. Mandel said he was contacted by the organization when they realized the house was largely vacant. "I thought it was a good cause, and it was empty at that point," he said. He loaned the house free of charge-though not without considering how he could also benefit from the event. "Hopefully, this gives [the house] more exposure, and we'll have more buyers," he said.

On Nov. 7 at 8 p.m., bidding on the East 68th Street townhouse will open at $7 million in the Park Avenue Room at the Inter-Continental the Barclay hotel, on East 48th Street between Park and Lexington avenues. Assuming the reserve price is met, Dr. Mandel should have his deal soon enough.

He certainly hopes this will be the case, because the hassle has already worn thin with him. "It's too overwhelming, and I don't need the aggravation," he said about his long search for a buyer. "And I don't want to be a landlord."

Carnegie Hill

65 East 96th Street Three-bed, three-bath, 1,600-square-foot condo. Asking: $1.25 million. Selling: $1.25 million. Charges: $828 Taxes: $400. Time on the market: one day. 96TH STREET OR BUST This 15-story building near Park Avenue was recently converted from rental apartments to condos by Intell Management, who bought it in 1999 for $18 million. Only a few months ago, however, did the renter in this three-bedroom apartment at the front of the 12th floor decide to vacate. As soon as the renter was out, the apartment-with a foyer, parquet floors, a dining room and views of Central Park-was redone by Intell. Picture a limestone bathroom, a marble bathroom and a granite kitchen. "It was very much a luxury apartment," said broker Daniella Kunen of Douglas Elliman. The buyers were a young family so anxious to live in Carnegie Hill that they didn't even try to negotiate the price down.

Upper East Side

345 East 81st Street (Eaton House) Two-bed, two-bath, 1,200-square-foot co-op. Asking: $479,000. Selling: $460,000. Charges: $1,222; 61 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: four months. FRIENDS WITH KIDS "This apartment is on a low floor looking to the back of the building, so it wasn't such an easy sale," said Corcoran Group broker Jackie Teplitzky-Dobens of this place near First Avenue. And, to be fair, it isn't a total doozy. Its highlights are a second bedroom large enough for two kids to share, a balcony and its good condition. A couple expecting their first baby "liked the apartment immediately," said Ms. Teplitzky-Dobens. Their main reason for taking the place: one friend in the building and another moving in. The buyers planned to do only cosmetic work before moving in.

UPPER WEST SIDE

165 West End Avenue Two-bed, two-bath, 1,274-square-foot co-op. Asking: $630,000. Selling: $617,000. Charges: $1,346; 49 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: one TEACHERS IN NEED OF AN EXTENSION Two recently retired teachers were getting desperate. It was August, and they hadn't found an apartment to buy in Manhattan, even though they'd already agreed to sell their longtime home on Long Island on Sept. 13. A last-minute solution came in the form of this two-bedroom apartment at a building in the Lincoln Tower complex, one of the few two-bedroom apartments in the building with a view of the West Side and the Hudson River. They quickly made an offer, which was accepted the same day, and signed a contract two weeks later. The apartment, which is in estate condition, needs lots of work, according to the listing broker, Judith Kahn of Insignia Douglas Elliman. "I think they will renovate piece by piece, but it certainly needs to be updated." The deal closed on Sept. 13.

200 Riverside Boulevard (Trump Place) Three-bed, three-bath, 1,800-square-foot condo. Asking: $1.375 million. Selling: $1.375 million. Charges: $851. Taxes: $31. Time on the market: three weeks. TRUMP'S KIND OF LADY This corner apartment in Donald Trump's Riverside Park development near 70th Street had almost everything the woman who bought it on Sept. 21 wanted: Upper West Side location, lots of light, three bedrooms, proximity to a park (Riverside Park is just a block away), all for under $2 million. And the woman had to have a condo, because she intended to buy the place through a trust. "I don't think there is a co-op in the city that would accept that," said her broker, Julie Friedman of Bellmarc

Realty. Although the buyer would have preferred a prewar building, prewar condos are hard to come by on the Upper West Side if you don't want to live on Broadway. "But this had the prewar feel, because the ceilings were so high." The apartment also has a washer and dryer, a windowed kitchen, lots of closet space and herringbone floors.