By Matt Chaban 3/21/12 2:09am

Manhattan Transfers

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From Capote to GTA.

A Rockstar Record! Grand Theft Auto Creator Dan Houser Buys Truman Capote Mansion for $12.5 M.

It has been said in our screen-addled age that video games are the new fiction. Be that as it may, Grand Theft Auto must then be our Moby Dick, which would make Dan Houser modern America’s Herman Melville. Or maybe he’s Dickens—Mr. Houser is British, and his work is equally dour and gritty.

How fitting, then, that the Rockstar Games co-founder is the new owner of an illustrious Brooklyn Heights mansion at 70 Willow Street where Truman Capote, along with some of the borough’s richest men, once lived. The sale, at exactly $12.5 million according to city records, is the most expensive in Brooklyn history, and, by extension, anywhere outside of Manhattan. It surpasses the previous record by a full $1.5 million.

If there was any question that video games had surpassed films, music and books for cultural—to say nothing of economic—primacy, this should bring such debates to an end. In Cold Blood has been dehtroned by Red Dead Redemption. Read More

By Drew Grant 12/05/11 6:41pm

Big Real Estate

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Floor plans for your End of the World Party Pad (Photo via Sotheby's International Realty)

Sotheby's Auctions Off Apocalypse-Proof Luxury Estate/Missile Silo

If you’re the kind of person who has a backroom stock’s worth of batteries, flashlights, canned food, and clean water just in case , than Sotheby’s has the perfect home for you! This 195-acre property in the middle of a Saranac state park is being sold to highest bidder by the International Realty arm of the auction house, and it’s an impressive lot. Your own missile silo? Check! A tarmac and airplane hanger on your estate? Check! Two-thousand pound blast doors? Do we even need to answer that? Read More

By Chloe Malle 8/19/10 1:51pm

The Way He Lived Then: Dunne's Midtown Penthouse Sells for $1.2 M.

One week from today will mark the one-year anniversary of the death of legendary social scribe Dominick Dunne. The novelist and journalist whose writing often focused on the travails of the priveleged classes and their frequent tanglings with the law, lived in a one-bedroom penthouse apartment at 155 East 49th Street. Early last December, the Read More

By Staff 1/27/10 8:11pm

Wooster Act: Whoopi Sells Soho Loft for $2.98 M.

Afficionados know that Whoopi Goldberg’s parents didn’t name her Whoopi and their last name wasn’t Goldberg. In fact, she was born Caryn Elaine Johnson, and only took her stage name after someone made a petty joke about flatulence. Her double identity proved a very useful disguise when the bawdy comedienne’s Soho loft sold: City records Read More