SoHo
SMASHING PUMPKINS’ PIE IN SKY
Billy Corgan, chrome-domed, suburban-angst-filled front man for the harrowingly successful college rock band Smashing Pumpkins, is moving to SoHo, one floor below Lolita-esque teen actress Claire Danes. Real estate sources say he’s signed a contract to pay $1.3 million for a 4,500-square-foot semi-raw loft, a condo, on Wooster Street.
A year ago, things weren’t so happy for Mr. Corgan: A keyboardist who was touring with the band overdosed and died at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. But after selling many millions of copies of the album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness , a pensive epic that Mr. Corgan likened to his generation’s version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall , he hit the financial high notes necessary to afford something more splendid than his Lower East Side pied-à-terre. A spokesman for Mr. Corgan would not comment on the singer’s new apartment.
Is this the end of the alternative-rocker life style for Mr. Corgan, who dated Courtney Love back before she discovered Kurt Cobain and couture? Apparently not. The new digs of the singer who once penned the lines, “The killer in you is the killer in me,” are part of a former warehouse that brokers describe as “spooky.”
Upper East Side
124 East 64th Street
Four-bed, 5.5-bath, 4,500-square-foot prewar town house.
Asking: $4.275 million. Selling: $4.275 million.
Time on market: six months.
NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A PRINCE OF A DAD
After dropping about $9.5 million on a 5,200-square-foot duplex at super-scrupulous 834 Fifth Avenue early this year, Tony-laden Broadway producer Hal Prince, left, decided his newly married daughter needed a nice comfy home, too. So he paid $4 million for this stuccoed town house and gave it to his producer-daughter, Daisy, and her new husband, Alexander Gaberman, bottom, who plays a speechwriter on the ABC sitcom Spin City . Mr. Prince recently said that his revival of Show Boat is “basically a story about family … I just had a grandchild from my son, and my daughter recently got married, so you can see where my head’s been for the past several years.” Lucky for these newlyweds, his wallet was in the same place. The transaction took place not long after the couple’s wedding, which was held at the Pierre hotel in front of Liza Minnelli, Spin City star Michael J. Fox, Beverly Sills and about 350 pals. The five-story house is described by brokers who have seen it as “devastatingly charming.” There’s a country kitchen, a wine closet in the cellar, a cute little garden, a terrace and an elevator. “It’s basically just a brownstone that’s been fancied up,” said one. Still, not a bad dowry. (Calls to Mr. Prince’s office were not returned.)
Low East 60’s, near Lexington Avenue
Five-story, 6,600-square-foot prewar town house.
Asking: $2.25 million. Selling: $1.8 million.
Time on market: six months.
HOLLYWOOD IN MANHATTAN, PRE-NOBU
The glory days of this house mirrored the glory days of Hollywood in the 1930’s and 1940’s; in fact, it was the New York haunt of actor Franchot Tone, left, who was in about 100 movies and did time married to Joan Crawford (albeit during her young, sexy period). Tone’s personal notoriety-he once got in a fistfight with boxer Tom Neal over blonde starlet Barbara Payton-did not get too much in the way of his starring with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935); with Bette Davis in Dangerous (1935); and with Henry Fonda in the great Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (1962). He also worked with Ms. Crawford in The Gorgeous Hussy (1936). Tone died of cancer in this house in 1968, having spent much of his later career in TV westerns. (Note the carriage house out back, formerly accessed by a passageway that ran alongside the building.) The new owner plans to get restore the place, which had been divided into apartments, to its 1930’s grandeur. Broker: Leslie J. Garfield & Company.
