Ed Bradley Jr., co-editor of cbs’s 60 Minutes for more than 20 years and a rabid Knicks fan, is also a Hamptons fixture-or at least a fringe character.
Four years after buying a two-acre spread north of Montauk Highway in East Hampton for $950,000, Mr. Bradley recently paid $1.35 million for the 2.77-acre place next-door.
“The property next to his became available, and he just snatched it up,” said Kevin Tedesco, manager of CBS News communications, about Mr. Bradley’s purchase of 8 St. Regis Court, on a tiny street that leads directly down to the Sag Harbor Bay and near land that used to belong to a summer camp.
While it doubles Mr. Bradley’s privacy buffer, the acquisition is also good news for neighbors, who say Mr. Bradley brings some credibility to this northwest part of East Hampton. The locals include Donna Karan, Alec Baldwin and Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, who paid $2.7 million for a house nearby on Hedges Banks Drive, also in 1998.
Bidding-Bing, Bidding-Boom
Though North Caldwell, N.J., may be the fictional home of Tony Soprano, the show is largely filmed at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City. James Gandolfini, a.k.a. Tony Soprano, lives in a Tribeca loft. And Jersey-raised Sopranos creator David Chase, sources say, is now sniffing around a fancy Upper East Side condo.
Though an HBO spokesman for Mr. Chase would not comment, real-estate sources say that the Sopranos producer, creator and creative director has toured a three-bedroom rental apartment at 610 Park Avenue, on the market for $19,500 a month, three times this winter.
The fancy condo building, formerly the Mayfair Hotel, is a 15-story brown-brick building erected in 1925. It was converted to 40 condos in 2000 and houses the four-star restaurant Daniel in its former lobby. The chef-restaurateur Daniel Boulud keeps an apartment in the building, as does singer Luther Vandross.
Only since his show got picked up has Mr. Chase become a New Yorker. Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., he’s spent most of his life in the Garden State. The only child of an engineer turned hardware-store owner and a telephone-directory proofreader, he moved to Clifton, N.J., at the age of 5 and then to North Caldwell, the setting for his show. He majored in English at N.Y.U. but then got his master’s in film at Stanford University and moved to Los Angeles in 1971, where he lived for the next 30 years writing for television.
Reports say his current address is in Gramercy Park, but sources say that may not be the case for very long.
HELL’S KITCHEN
457 West 43rd Street One-bed, one-and-a-half-bath, 1,100-square-foot co-op. Asking: $515,000. Selling: $480,000. Charges: $930; 51 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: three weeks. WEST VILLAGE REFUGEES FIND SHELTER When the owners of a West 13th Street townhouse decided to sell the place, a couple subletting the ground-floor apartment were about to be put out on the street. “It was just a sublet, so they were allowed to do that,” said Corcoran Group broker Lisa Camillieri of the owners. The almost homeless couple found another townhouse on West 43rd Street near Tenth Avenue with a ground-floor apartment for sale-this one a duplex with a garden out back. It was just like home, minus the landlord and the irresistibly sky-high resale value.
SOHO
101 Thompson Street Studio, one-bath, 400-square-foot co-op. Asking: $215,000. Selling: $226,000. Charges: $500; 50 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: two weeks.
THE 400-SQUARE-FOOT WAR For sale: an apartment on Thompson Street, between Spring and Prince streets, $500 maintenance. What’s the catch? Four hundred square feet in a fifth-floor walk-up. Ouch ! “It looks much bigger,” according to Christine Nugent of Insignia Douglas Elliman. That’s what they all say. The sellers, a graphic designer and an architect, had made the place livable after 10 years there. Seeing a way out of the madness in June, they put the place on the market with Ms. Nugent and started looking for a one-bedroom apartment in Tribeca. The tiny studio quickly became the center of a turf war between the owners of the one-bedroom apartment on one side of it and the owners of the two-bedroom apartment on the other. Those living in the smaller space won!
TRIBECA
41 Warren Street Two-bed, two-bath, 2,050-square-foot condo. Asking: $1.750 million. Selling: $1.525 million. Charges: $900.66. Taxes: $889.78 Time on the market: five months.
THE NEXT WAVE DOWNTOWN After a year and a half of construction-including reinforcing the whole building from the sub-basement up-seven new lofts at 41 Warren Street came on the market just before Sept. 11, only to be closed after the terrorist attack until November. At that point, said Mary Ellen Cashman of Stribling & Associates, who represented the building in this deal, the developers dropped the price of this unit-with a Viking stove, a terrace off the kitchen and a fireplace-by $200,000, to $1.75 million. An artist and a businessman bought it in early March for an additional $225,000 discount. And that doesn’t factor in the additional perks they’re now eligible for as new Tribecans.
