As if it weren’t already clear that enormous Manhattan real estate is now simply expensive instead of gigantically overpriced, this week’s Observer had items about a former Bear Stearns executive cutting $4 million off his apartment’s tag and a huge maps dealer taking $10 million off his mansion’s price.
But there was a $9 million price cut this week that hits much closer to home. According to Sotheby’s International Realty‘s Web site, the tag for our old 25-foot-wide, 17-room, eight-bedroom, five-story headquarters at 54 East 64th Street, where this newspaper lived until a move to the Flatiron District, was just chopped from $36 million to $27 million. According to the marketing pictures, the townhouse is looking a whole lot better than it did during its Observer era, which were days of glorious squalor.
“After the newspaper left, it was in not such great condition,” a broker said delicately three years ago, once the house was sold to the Irish investor Derek Quinlan for $18.74 million. He bought the place from the Russian developer Janna Bullock, who had bought the house for only $9.5 million after The Observer moved out—then she remade it into a Kips Bay Decorator Show House.
Now it’s a “triple mint estate,” the Sotheby's listing says, with a “perfectly proportioned Federal-style façade, sweeping spiral staircase, and a stunning thirty foot living room/office surrounded by full-height French-polished rosewood paneling.”
All that triple-mint rosewood paneling now costs $9 million less than it did a week ago. Sotheby’s broker Fred Williams did not return a call or email.
