By Stephen Jacob Smith 4/17 3:59pm

Manhattan Transfers

Try not to get blood on your Annabelle Selldorf-deisgned walls, Marina!

Marina Abramović Buys $2.65 M. Glass Box of Her Very Own

Tilda Swinton may have stolen Marina Abramović voyeuristic thunder at MoMA with her sleeping-in-a-glass-box shows, but when it comes to displaying oneself in glass boxes, Ms. Abramović will not be outdone: the Serbian grand matriarch of performance art just picked up a $2.65 million two-bedroom pad at Philip Johnson’s Urban Glass House.

The eighth-floor apartment at 330 Spring Street, in Hudson Square, was asking $2.6 million, but listing broker Suzun Bennet at Town Residential managed to get a bit over the asking price. “It was on the market for quite a while as an investor apartment,” Ms. Bennet told The Observer, but as soon as the rental tenant who was living there moved out, it sold. Unfortunately for seller Eliot Ferguson, though, it didn’t quite fetch the nearly $2.7 million that he paid for the unit at the end of 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble.

The 1,722-square foot condo’s interiors were done by Annabelle Selldorf, an inoffensive choice for a woman who once declared, “Art should be disturbing.” Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 3/25 10:48am

Manhattan Transfers

The second floor is the only floor with 12-foot ceilings.

Resale! Broker Tries For Fifth Sale of Same Tribeca Loft

Rarely do you find a broker with as much knowledge about an apartment as Town Residential’s Paddington Matz has on a full-floor spread she’s marketing at 288 West Street, a loft building dating back to 1860. Not only has she sold the unit four times over (she’s trying now for a fifth), but the first time she sold it, she actually owned it.

“It was the first loft I’d ever bought,” she told The Observer of unit #2W at the Medium Lipstick Building, as it’s known. “I bought it in 1996 for $155,000.” It had been on the market for double that, but this was before Tribeca became the hot neighborhood that it is today. “Back then there wasn’t even a promenade,” said Ms. Matz. “There was a cheapo parking lot on the West Side Highway across the street. It had no services whatsoever—the only grocery store was a Food Emporium.” (Today, said Food Emporium faces competition from a gleaming new Whole Foods just a few blocks to the south.) Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 2/20 7:37pm

Brooklyn Transfers

"I don't think we're in Greenpoint anymore, Hannah!"

‘Girls’ Cinematographer Tim Ives Wants to Cash Out of Cobble Hill

Girls cinematographer Tim Ives has been receiving his latest paychecks thanks to northern Brooklyn’s most famous show, but he’s poised to collect an exceptionally fat check from the sale of his South Brooklyn townhouse. Mr. Ives and wife Sonia have just listed their Cobble Hill home for a healthy $3.5 million (it may be a bit too late for Christine Quinn to save this neighborhood).

The couple picked up the South Brooklyn pad, at 173 Warren Street, in 2003 for a mere $1.4 million, according to city records, so they should be able to buy themselves something nice with the difference. Maybe something a little more womanly? Like a Tribeca loft? Read More

By Kim Velsey 11/02/12 4:02pm

Moving Madness

A bike might be Manhattanites best bet for moving these days (Amsterdamized, flickr).

Moving Mayhem: Expired Leases and Relocation Plans Run Afoul of Gas Shortages and Power Outages

Joanne Russo felt a sense of panic when she awoke on October 29 to a rain-soaked, wind-battered city and reports that the worst was yet to come. It wasn’t the storm anxiety causing hearts to race around the city—Ms. Russo and her roommate were scheduled to move that morning. Their lease was up on October 31st and their landlord had been unpleasantly insistent that they clear out early. The couple who were moving into their apartment had left their place the week before and were living in a temporary unit downstairs. Ms. Russo felt that she couldn’t stay until after the hurricane, but she wasn’t sure if she could leave either.

“The last thing we wanted was to get stuck,” said Ms. Russo. “We were afraid the movers would bail on us and then we wouldn’t be able to leave for days.”

She was relieved when Imperial Moving called at 8 a.m. to say that they would be there in an hour. As businesses shut down and traffic vanished, the movers emptied the women’s two-bedroom on East 31st Street and carted their belongings to their new sixth-floor apartment at 20th Street and First Avenue. They finished shortly before the electricity went out and the elevator shuddered to a stop. Ms. Russo knows she was lucky, even if she and her roommate can only unpack in the daylight, hauling the empty boxes down the darkened stairwell. Read More