By Kim Velsey 2/01 4:58pm

Manhattan Transfers

Catch her in Carnegie Hill. (ABC/Donna Svennevik)

Seeking Better Real Estate, Cynthia McFadden Buys $5 M. Carnegie Hill Townhouse

When we saw that Nightline co-host Cynthia McFadden had sold her three-bedroom co-op at 129 East 69th Street last week, we wondered where she would be moving. Like the 11:35 p.m. time slot on ABC, a pre-war co-op in a white glove Lenox Hill building is prime real estate.

The answer is Carnegie Hill (and, if you’re watching ABC, it’s 12:35 a.m.). The famed journalist tells The Observer that she and her teenaged son are upgrading to a four-story brownstone on the Upper East Side neighborhood. Read More

By Kim Velsey 11/13/12 12:07pm

Manhattan Transfers

Not so intimate.

The Death of a Crazy Dream: Magnificently Complicated Fifth Avenue Spread Is Off the Market

Amassing and connecting a melange of co-op apartments scattered about a coal baron’s Fifth Avenue mansion was an outlandish dream, even for Howard Ronson, the commercial real estate developer who kicked off the buying spree at 828 Fifth Avenue, also known as the Berwind mansion, before his death in 2007.

His heirs tried to carry on, but they could never quite replicate their patriarch’s acquisitive charms. With four of the nine apartments in hand, they stopped far short of Ronson’s goal of total building domination. Nor could they (or would they) sell the spread, at least not for $72 million. After putting the apartment on the market in May, in a bid to catch one of the many over-eager trophy hunters said to be sniffing around New York, the family pulled the property just a few months later. Read More

By Elise Knutsen 9/12/11 5:19pm

Manhattan Transfers

6 Photos

30 East 70th Street

Social Butterflies Flit into $5.1 M. Half of Broadway Producers UES Duplex

Florence Swinsky is going to need a fleet of moving vans. Ms. Swinsky, the widow of Tony-award winning Broadway producer Morton Swinsky who was behind major productions including Jersey Boys, The Addams Family, Chicago and Spamalot, has just sold the apartment she shared with her late husband at 33 East 70th Street. Literally every inch of their apartment is filled with works of art, large and small. Read More

By Max Abelson 7/28/09 10:56pm

Top Brokers Cattle-Called for Madoff

When brokers from the most posh Manhattan brokerages filed into a penthouse at 133 East 64th Street for a secret meeting earlier this month, the fact that the place had been seized two weeks earlier by U.S. marshals from contemporary America’s greatest financial villain was not the only thing on their minds.

What must have Read More

By Max Abelson 2/14/08 12:57pm

My Vespa, Myself

If the diamond-brooched Upper East Side brokers all give up their chauffeured Rolls-Royces for scooters, is it a sign that the Manhattan real estate apocalypse really is nigh?

Corcoran senior vice president Sharon Baum, who briefly dated Michael Bloomberg after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1965, has been chauffeured to and from her Read More