Yes, that's right, we're talking about none other than William Lie Zeckendorf. The vaunted developer who just sold his 41st-floor condo at 15 Central Park West for $40 million, the second-highest sale this year and the highest ever per square foot, has now bought a spread at 927 Fifth Avenue for $3 million above the asking price. 

The Post previously reported that Mr. Zeckendorf had purchased Bruce Wasserstein's 14-room spread, which was up for auction for $26 million. He was rumored to have put down $27 million, but it turns out even that was a conservative estimate.

Public records now show that he's paid $29.1 million and some change. That nudges the price slightly above the $4,200 a square foot he was said to have paid, but like every other sale in the city, a bargain compared to his recent successes.

The Wasserstein place is much bigger than Mr. Zeckendorf's self-developed modern digs. Of course, the co-op also has the Mary Tyler Moore glam factor, as well as the legendary chutzpah of having rejected Barbra Streisand. But is it worth giving up one of the city's best views? We're not totally convinced.

lkusisto@observer.com

--Talk about inside entertainment. Director Kenneth Druckerman has sold his Tribeca apartment to NBC exec Eve Goldman for $1.4 million. Mr. Druckerman should know a thing or two about apartment flipping from his work directing the Novegratz reality TV flick Nine By Design, and, indeed, the apartment at 10 Jay Street has been newly renovated with, the Douglas Elliman listing tells us, "a concrete island bigger than tankers on the nearby Hudson."

--Chef Charles Pouchot and his sommelier wife, Janet Pouchot, have dropped $1.65 million on a penthouse at 203 West 90th Street. ChefDb tells us Mr. Pouchot currently works as the general manager at Aureole. The seller is John W. Young III, an attorney, and his wife. The listing tells us the duplex apartment features three bedrooms, three bathrooms, three exposures and a "terrific outdoor space." Incredibly, not one mention of the kitchen.

--This is one case when you'd definitely want the furniture included. Marc and Diana Jacoby, who run a precious antiques business, Phlip Colleck Ltd., have shed their pad at 419 East 57th Street for $1.315 million. The buyers are the remarkably well-bred Quinn R. Barton III, along with his wife, Elizabeth Barton. Mr. Barton is a partner at San Fransico-based real estate investment fund Carmel Partners.

lkusisto@observer.com

As The New York Times noted late last year, the store marks another sign of Columbus Circle's transformation:

The store, of course, will front on Broadway and not on Central Park West. The building's condo owners--including Denzel Washington, Sandy Weill and Norman Lear, as well as 15CPW's developers, William and Arthur Zeckendorf--will not have to mix with the shoppers below.

The Observer's Chris Shott will have more on the opening on Friday.

The Plaza Hotel, on the other hand, has had four such deals close for above $10 million in the last few months. These include the penultimate: In July, one still-unknown buyer spent $51.5 million on six apartments on the seventh floor—if it holds, it will resound as the single biggest apartment deal in New York City history. (Most of the Plaza's sales have been much less spectacular, some for under—gasp!—$2 million, meaning, in a strict competition of amounts, Fifteen wins so far.)

The Plaza and Fifteen Central Park West together represent the crest of a wave of luxury development in Manhattan that commenced shortly after the turn of the decade. Both have storied pedigrees—the Plaza was an iconic hotel in its past life, and some of it will remain a hotel post-condo conversion; Fifteen was built by the Zeckendorf brothers on the site of the Mayflower Hotel—and both were heavily marketed as pinnacles of luxury living.

And now both have prices that will reliably astound as sales continue to close throughout the fall and into next year. But there’s a difference.

The roster of buyers for Fifteen Central Park West is known to even the most casual real estate voyeur in New York—The Observer, for instance, broke the news of Mr. Weill buying in the building back in July; we just didn’t know the amount. Other notables who plan to buy include rock star Sting, actor Denzel Washington, Jeff Gordon of NASCAR fame, director Norman Lear, sportscaster Bob Costas, and the Zeckendorf brothers themselves, Arthur and William Lie.

In the Plaza, the buyers have been… um, no one you’d know—though, to be fair, these are people paying well above the average Manhattan home price of over $1,100 a square foot, so they must definitely be somebody. The New York Times suggested that developer Harry Macklowe might be the $51.5 million buyer--or perhaps the buyer behind another $50 million-plus deal there that's pending. Otherwise, the unfamiliar fans the flames of speculation about which notables might be eyeing the icon on Central Park South.

Central Park West—and Fifth Avenue on the park’s east—have always attracted the well-heeled and the well-known. The Plaza, in its day as a hotel eminence, did the same.

Perhaps what we’re seeing is a second act for the Plaza both enviable and disappointing, but ultimately democratic: In the age of the $50 million apartment, money really is the in; fame’s merely an exclamation point, nice if you have it. The simply riche—whether nouveau or ancien—have taken the Plaza. Will they one day, a generation or three from now, do the same at Fifteen Central Park West?

With reporting by Max Abelson.

Unit 7C has closed for $9.67 million, according to city records. The buyer, listed as Carolina Real Property LLC, took its time closing. The deal went to contract back in September 2005 and did not close until just a few weeks ago. The true identity of the buyer could not immediately be determined, but we're guessing it may be NASCAR star Jeff Gordon, who has lived in North Carolina and who is known to have been an early buyer at the condo.

Fifteen Central Park West is one of the most anticipated new developments in recent city history. Developed by Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf, the two-tower spread with 201 condos should record nearly $2 billion in sales when all is said and done.

Over the past two years, several notables besides Mr. Gordon have gone to contract for the spreads that average over $3,000 a square foot, including hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, who went to contract on a penthouse in November 2005 for a then-record $45 million. Other buyers in the Robert A.M. Stern-designed condo include musician Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, sportscaster Bob Costas, director Norman Lear, and actor Denzel Washington.

It all started with William Zeckendorf Sr., the real-estate mogul’s real-estate mogul, whose greatest fault lay in being years ahead of his time. He assembled the parcel on which the United Nations rose in 1947 and also built the Roosevelt Field shopping center on Long Island, the Century City complex in Los Angeles, and several urban-renewal projects in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Then he went broke.

His son, William Jr., vowed to take fewer risks, and so he did, for a while—but then he too fell upon difficult times.

His sons, Arthur, 47, and William Lie, 48, have just put up the premier new residential building in Manhattan at 15 Central Park West: 35 elegant stories of limestone, plus a swimming pool, screening room and restaurant. The pair has grossed more than $1.6 billion in sales so far, including the highest price ever paid for a condominium in New York City: $45 million, for a duplex penthouse.

“Sales will reach $2 billion on a $1 billion cost,” Arthur Zeckendorf told The Observer. “Our strategy was to focus on the high end, because that is where we saw strength in the market today. If we saw strength in the West 30’s and the West 40’s, we would go there.”

The Zeckendorfs made a very expensive but tightly controlled bet on 15 Central Park West. They spent $400 million to buy into one of the city’s best neighborhoods and then built condominiums, which, once sold, would quickly let them pay off the loans—and then some.

The main challenge was selling those condos, and that they did handsomely: Four-fifths of the 200-odd units in 15 Central Park West have been sold.

Before 15 Central Park West went up, Arthur did two studies: one concerning the features that made the great New York City apartment buildings great (courtyards, for example), and another about the best kind of limestone to use. The answer: Indiana limestone. And so the Zeckendorfs clad their building in stone from the same quarry that supplied the Empire State Building.

“They are calmly rational,” said M. Myers Mermel, a real-estate investor and consultant who has done business with the Zeckendorfs. “They just go quietly about the things that they are doing and seem to be able to accommodate the changes as they happen.”

Contrast that manner with William Sr., whose company, Webb & Knapp, built $3 billion worth of commercial projects in the space of 20 years, and who cultivated an image as a dealmaker and tycoon. “He was a tall man who always wore a Homburg,” said Kent Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society, who was working as a copywriter in the same building that the senior Zeckendorf had his company in about four decades ago. “He had this two-story glassed-in lounge on the roof where he would take all manner of people: I.M. Pei, Jackie Onassis.”

“Big Bill” Zeckendorf liked transformative projects that forever altered the land around them. His most celebrated transaction was taking an option on 17 acres of slaughterhouses along the East River knowing that they must be valuable, even though he didn’t know why.

As his option came due and he faced losing his deposit, he saw a newspaper headline proclaiming that the city was about to lose the United Nations because it couldn’t find a place for the organization’s headquarters. Zeckendorf called Mayor William O’Dwyer, who got the Rockefeller family to buy the land for $8.5 million and then donate it to the U.N.

In 1965, Zeckendorf found himself unable to make the mortgage payments on an overextended empire and went bankrupt. It didn’t take long for him to start a new venture, however. He found a few partners and, as his first deal, convinced a publishing house to extend its lease. The publisher was game, but wanted Zeckendorf to write his memoirs in return. So he did.

His son, Bill Jr., worked for his father at the comeback firm, which he eventually took over. Bill Jr. is known for his unassuming character, and he had early success by reviving undervalued properties like the Delmonico and the Barbizon. Then he made a much bigger gamble as part of the Union Square redevelopment, building a massive condo complex at the southeast corner of the park and naming it Zeckendorf Towers, after his father. (Well, after himself, too.)

In the late 1980’s, he did World Wide Plaza, the full-block residential-office complex between 49th and 50th streets, on the west side of Eighth Avenue. To entice commercial tenants to that edge of midtown, the Zeckendorfs offered equity in the building, because giving away part of the building was better than paying the interest rates that a bank would demand if the project were built before any occupants had signed leases. Neither project fared well in the 1990’s slump, and Bill Jr. lost majority control of both. He retired in 1992 and, now 77, lives in Santa Fe, N.M., in a development owned by his second wife, a former ballerina. (His first wife was Guri Lie, the daughter of former U.N. Secretary General Trygve Lie.)

Arthur Zeckendorf says that he and his brother didn’t cultivate their current approach to the family business in order to avoid the risks that plagued their father and grandfather.

“I would say they have both been very successful developers,” he told The Observer. “I would say our approach has been a combination of both: really trying to do major projects like my grandfather did and also my father, but to do them one at a time and to make it very successful.”

From an early age, the Zeckendorf brothers were exposed to their grandfather’s business and were quickly enchanted. After college, the two began working for their father, reporting to work at 7 a.m. and sometimes staying until midnight. In 1995, they bought part of Terra Holdings, a company that includes the Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead Property brokerages. Since then, they have turned their last name into a luxury brand, first with 515 Park Avenue and now with 15 Central Park West.