Manhattan Transfers

The late Araxia M. Buckhantz's two-bedroom sprawl at the massively proper 834 Fifth Avenue is the kind of perfect little chunk of New York real estate that can make a very important and normally staid uptown broker cackle with excitement. "I absolutely am wild about this apartment," one agent who auditioned for the listing told The Observer last month. “I’d do anything to handle it."

Back then, three sources had said the auditioned brokers included, "Brown Harris Stevens’ Ann Jeffery (once a Harper’s Bazaar editor); Corcoran’s Leighton Candler (who is listing the Brooke Astor duplex); Serena Boardman at Sotheby’s (listing Aby Rosen’s $75 million limestone mansion); Stribling’s bow-tied Kirk Henckels (listing a floor of the old Nelson Rockefeller triplex at 810 Fifth Avenue); and Caroline Guthrie (reported to be taking co-ownership of Edward Lee Cave’s boutique brokerage, where she’s president)."

Reached on the phone just now, Buckhantz's daughter told The Observer that the estate has found its broker: Ms. Jeffery. "I met with a lot of wonderful realtors. I don't want to comment negatively about anybody else," she said, when asked why she made the choice. "No, I don't want to get into this. I don't want to."  read more »

"Colombia has progressed—with the strong support of the United States—from a nation under siege by narcoterrorists and paramilitary vigilantes," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates wrote in The New York Times this year, "to one poised to become a linchpin of security and prosperity in South America."

Nothing says prosperity quite like a 12-room, $7.25 million apartment on Fifth Avenue, which, according to city records, is what Claudia Blum, Colombia's U.N. ambassador, has just assembled.

As the Web site Cityfile first reported, Ms. Blum and her husband, Francisco Barberi, paid $3.35 million earlier this month for a co-op at 936 Fifth Avenue. But deeds show that the couple also paid $3.  read more »

Rupert Murdoch should whip out the jelly molds and store up on extra sugar: His triplex penthouse at 834 Fifth Avenue is getting a new neighbor. According to a source, a two-bedroom co-op on 834 Fifth’s 13th floor, below Mr. Murdoch’s penthouse, is about to go on the market.

The place belongs to the estate of Araxia M. Buckhantz, whose cousin was playboy oil magnate Nubar Gulbenkian (pictured), the man Time once called a “Mephistophelean Santa,” and of whom a friend once said, “Nubar is so tough that every day he tires out three stockbrokers, three horses and three women.  read more »

January 1981 was such a simpler, happier time! A sprightly, nice-faced ex-actor named Ronald Reagan succeeded old Jimmy Carter, and, poof, Iran released its American hostages after 444 days; the stainless steel, gull-winged DeLorean cruised off the production line; and a man named Murray H. Goodman paid just $1.41 million (according to notes kept by a New York brokerage) for a duplex at 960 Fifth Avenue, probably the finest apartment house in the country.

Mr. Goodman, a shopping center magnate whose eponymous firm has developed, owned and managed over 18 million square feet of shopping complexes from Neptune, N.J., to Bethlehem, Pa.  read more »

No self-respecting Upper East Side co-op board, let alone one controlling any of the neighborhood’s highest-gated apartment houses, would let one puffed-up owner take over a massive share of a given co-op’s space. That’s why when two next-door duplexes came on the market this year at 740 Park for $35 million and $38 million, it was essentially silly to be dreaming up a buyer for the $73 million spread.

It’s distinctly more absurd to imagine anyone buying up four units to make a triplex at the famously ornery 2 East 67th Street, controlled by Arthur Carter. Mr. Carter, the former publisher of this newspaper, is considered to be one of New York City’s more authoritarian apartment board chiefs.  read more »

Last year, Richard Mack, an executive at the multibillion-dollar investment group Apollo Real Estate, which happens to be owned by his father, paid $23 million for Spence-Chapin's 24,463-square-foot headquarters at 4-8 East 94th Street. (It was built from three 19th-century row houses, which explains that address.)

Mr. Mack got permission from the Landmarks Preservation Commission in December to replace a homely three-story addition over one-third of the house with a full 60-foot penthouse, among other upgrades, then gutted the place, and then put the place back on the market for $59 million, $36 million more than he paid.

The tag just came down to $49.95 million, according to Ms. Chiang's Web site. Considering that no New York mansion has ever sold for more than $53 million (and remember that renovation costs at this triple-wide mansion may likely require well above $3.05 million), it's still a hefty tab. And of course the new tag is still huge enough to qualify for The Observer's 10 biggest listings list.  read more »

One of the Upper East Side's oddest townhouse stories--a tale about two top brokers and a herringbone-floored mansion with 18 rooms and 10 fireplaces--has taken an amazing U-turn.

The story started a few years ago, when a convicted sex offender living in California was fighting with his siblings over the family's 13,137-square-foot limestone mansion at 9 East 67th Street. It took three Corcoran brokers and 14 months, but the Russian real estate investor Janna Bullock finally bought the house from the bickering family in April 2005 for $10 million.

That's when the real fun started. That November the house was on the market again, listed by two Stribling brokers for $29 million; in 2006, it came off the market; in autumn 2007, it was on again, this time for $35 million and with Sotheby's Nikki Field, who has her own boutique group of well-coiffed ladies at that posh brokerage.

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The idea that rappers are valuable not just for their awesomely rhyming insights into romance and street life (“Safe sex is great sex/ Better use a latex,” Lil’ Wayne says, “’Cause you don’t want that late text/ That ‘I think I’m late’ text”), but for marketing Vitaminwater and ChapStick—or for star turns in Hollywood films—has turned out to be massively lucrative.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Chris Lighty, whose pioneering firm Violator manages rap icons like Busta Rhymes, Diddy and 50 Cent (pictured, right, with Mr. Lighty), just bought two apartments at the new mega-condo Chelsea Stratus. He paid $5.  read more »

On Tuesday morning, the jaw of every real estate obsessive in Manhattan was hanging way down on the radiant-heat floor. Besides a Page Six item about the aging doyenne broker Alice Mason downsizing her firm, which was not a massive shock, the social diarist David Patrick Columbia’s wonderfully patrician Web site had a massive real estate story.

“Corcoran … is closing,” he wrote, “with its biggest producers moving over to Brown Harris Stevens.” But that wasn’t all. “Also closing after years in business is the high end residential brokerage Edward Lee Cave, with his biggest producing brokers also moving over to Brown Harris.  read more »

Until this week, when news broke that hedge fund manager John A. Griffin paid $32.25 million for a co-op at 1030 Fifth Avenue, New York’s 10 most expensive residential listings looked more or less doomed. The thinking went that none of the three townhouses and seven apartments, each asking (officially or quietly) over $45 million, could possibly sell during this frozen downturn.

Now that Mr. Griffin’s deal spawns hope of a thaw—though there probably won’t be any more epic sales this year on account of the holidays—what might be 2009’s first massive sale?

First, consider that the $32.  read more »

In the wonderful imaginations of wild-haired, politically active college sophomores everywhere, the chief executive officers of multinational corporations meet in volcanic caverns lit by candelabra, drink good port, snicker about the foolish masses and sell one another their 24th-floor Manhattan condos with handshakes.

In reality, CEO-to-CEO deals really do happen, even during horrendous economic slumps, though volcanic caverns are not involved. According to city records, the much-celebrated Xerox chief Anne M. Mulcahy sold her apartment at the Grand Beekman on East 51st Street last month to Rober Pelzer, the new chief of Novartis Corp., the North American entity of the gigantic Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Novartis.  read more »

On July 16, Loews Corporation co-chairman Jonathan Tisch, whose father and uncle founded the multibillion-dollar conglomerate, paid a record $48 million for a co-op at the legendarily tyrannical 2 East 67th Street.

Loews’ share price hit $44.13 that summer day, and the Dow was over 11,308.

At the end of this Monday, Loews’ stock closed at $23.48, and the Dow was around 8,149.

But surely the economic downturn doesn’t matter to people at such a high-gated co-op; what matters is that the most recent sale at 2 East 67th (a building so overconfident that its natural Fifth Avenue address is shrugged off) was $48 million, which theoretically means all the neighboring spreads, even the ones on lower floors, could and should fetch something similar, downturns be damned.  read more »

The only real estate investor who flips vintage local properties outfitted with, say, reflecting ponds and bamboo walls, but who also flips massive thickets of self-storage spaces, and has been called “dreamy” by Gawker, is Adam Gordon. “I told my wife that before we were married,” he said this week about the blog’s compliment. “It may have closed the deal.”

They met when he opposed her application for a restaurant on Bond Street: “She got a much a better location, which turned out to be Double Crown,” the new colonialism-inspired eatery on the Bowery that just got two stars from Frank Bruni.  read more »

By the time 2008 ends, there will be two kinds of high-end brokers left in New York. Most will outwardly panic, and the sturdier will force their dread to simmer beneath a slightly clenched smile that says, “Everything is quite fine, thank you.” After all, a tiny (and dwindling) group of only wealthy people are willing to make real estate deals, at least the kind of big real estate deal that New York prides itself on.

In the past few weeks, The Observer has written about the children of a Texas natural-gas billionaire, a Gulf & Western co-founder, a Berkshire Hathaway billionaire and a Turkish billionaire all buying up Manhattan real estate.  read more »

Now that the American real estate crisis has leaked into once immune New York, surely the most pressing national housing question is whether Park Avenue’s executives, the ones who have been Goldman Sachs chairmen or at least board members at gigantic tobacco companies, will be able to sell off their pristine co-ops. And then, when the deals finally happen, will the spreads sell for anything close to asking price?

Robert C. Almon and John C. Whitehead can both rest easy. According to city records, both sold off some Park Avenue real estate last week, getting more or less what they had wanted for their posh spreads.  read more »

Coldplay, that quartet of droopy-eyed, arena-filling balladeers, may not be around after the end of next year. “I’m 31 now and I don’t think that bands should keep going past 33,” lead singer Chris Martin told the Daily Express this month, which led to rampant breakup rumors, which in turn led to The New Yorker’s wondrous and normally non-curmudgeonly music writer Sasha Frere-Jones to write, “As if Obama winning wasn’t enough good news.”

If Coldplay does die off, and Mr. Martin retreats with wife Gwyneth Paltrow to raise their funny-named offspring in, say, some Nordic cabin, New York City may be hosting the band’s lead guitarist.  read more »

If Dolly Lenz did not exist we would have to create her. The woman is a real estate mega-broker of mythological proportions: She has said that she has done $7 billion in sales, has personally owned 70 to 80 properties, and currently keeps 12 BlackBerrys; her name is in the news weekly, especially in the Post’s real estate column; her old falling-out with ex-protégé Michael Shvo is still realty’s juiciest feud; Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, a client, nicknamed her “Jaws.”

So imagine the gasps echoing around upscale Manhattan this month when the annual Real Estate Top 200, an objective ranking (by sales volume and what’s called transaction sides) sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, Real Trends and Lore Magazine, didn’t have Ms.  read more »

Two months back, when this reporter visited 11 Spring Street, Corcoran's Robby Browne was listing the 19th-century horse stables for $39.8 million.

(Actually, the 4,600-square-foot penthouse cost $17.95 million, the triplex downstairs was $15.15 million, and a flat in between, where this reporter saw his first-ever dual-flush toilet, cost $6.7 million--thus the $39.8 million total.)

But, according to a new listing, things have changed. Mr. Browne, one of the only uber-powerful New York real estate brokers who happens to be genuinely charming, seems to have lost the townhouse. Instead, Core has a new $36.5 million listing, a $3.3 million price cut. (Never mind that Caroline Cummings, a real estate heiress in her late 20s, paid only $12 million two years ago to buy the place from Rupert Murdoch's son Lachlan.)  read more »

Manhattan’s high-heeled real estate market is excruciatingly gloomy these days: One top-ranked broker was reached via cell phone on Monday while on a run in Florida, explaining that it was important to stay away from the metropolis’ fiery awfulness for the time being. It’s a different kind of gloom than in the rest of the country, where nearly one in four homeowners with mortgages owe more on payments than their houses are actually worth. But it’s gloom nonetheless. And prim Upper East Siders are doing gloomy things.

Consider Karen Fleiss, a hedge fund manager and former Barnard trustee, and her husband,

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If you lean back, close your eyes, switch on some easy listening and forget that high-heeled Manhattan real estate has slowed to a crestfallen crawl, maybe you’ll be able to pretend things are just as good as they were back on June 19, 2007.

That’s when Fortress Investment Group cofounder and COO Randal Nardone, three months removed from a Forbes billionaires list that ranked him as the world’s 557th richest man, signed a $22 million contract for a glass-walled duplex “skyhome” at the new Tribeca condo 101 Warren Street. (The 5,769-square-foot, five-bedroom apartment, with a 2,386-square-foot terrace, happens to actually be above the units listed as penthouses.  read more »

When an $80 million penthouse at 15 Central Park West came off the market late last month, it left a depressingly big hole in New York's super-luxury apartment market. (As it happens, an 18th-floor duplex in the building is being quietly offered for $75 million, while Courtney Sale Ross' sprawl at 740 Park is asking "over $60 million," but neither are official listings, so they don't quite count.)

Not that anyone actually keeps track of such things (actually, of course they do), but a relatively unthrilling penthouse at The Mark was, thanks to its $60 million tag, briefly the most expensive apartment on the market in New York.  read more »

In what must surely be a bit of good news for super-luxury Manhattan real estate--but, then again, must also be a bit of bad news--Hugh Jackman has closed on the Hudson River triplex that The Observer wrote about last month. It's a reason for jittery brokers to sigh, considering that two sources said last month it was "possible" the actor would walk away from his deal.

He didn't walk away, but one of those sources said the final sales price was between $20 and $23 million--lower than the $25 million-plus he was reportedly going to be paying. Maybe Mr. Jackman is a good haggler? Or maybe it's that every super-expensive apartment in New York is going to be open to negotiation for the foreseeable future.  read more »

Barely two weeks ago, The Observer wrote about Sheridan Mitchell Lorenz (daughter of Texas natural-gas billionaire George Mitchell), Alice R. Gottesman (daughter of Warren Buffett's billionaire friend David Gottesman) and Roy Judelson (son of Gulf & Western co-founder David Judelson) all buying new Manhattan real estate. And who could forget January's news that Hummer magnate Ira Rennert would be paying over $60 million for two Park Avenue co-ops for two daughters?

Children of Turkish billionaires are getting in on the fun, too. According to city records, young Murat Ozyegin, whose father Husnu Ozyegin is one of the 250 richest people on the planet, just paid $6.  read more »

David Turner, a soft-spoken and very kind-faced 51-year-old Westchester real estate broker, stood in his black fleece Columbia vest and Merrell shoes in something called the Love Temple, a pavilion in the perfectly manicured southwest section of a 64.6-acre estate.

Rain fell. Wild turkeys shuffled by. An owl hooted. It was like a Victorian novel, except Victorian novels end with marriages, and the main story at this infinite estate, Holly Hill, ended when the regal philanthropist Brooke Astor died here last year at age 105. She was survived by one son, Anthony Marshall, a handsome ex-ambassador who has pleaded not guilty to a 16-count indictment accusing him of stealing his mother’s fortune while she suffered from Alzheimer’s.  read more »

In an absurdly ideal New York City, 13-room co-op spreads overlooking pretty Upper East Side blocks would be reserved for public school teachers and organ donors, but executives who have recently sold their power plant companies to Bear Stearns would politely be forced to live more modestly.

But that’s not the way things are. According to city records, Dean Vanech, whose New Jersey-based Delta Power Company was acquired by Bear Stearns subsidiary Arroyo Energy early last year, bought a five-bedroom apartment at 33 East 70th on the day before the election. He and his wife, Denise, paid $14.8 million.  read more »

Even during these dreary times, the ambition that carries on in Manhattan real estate is practically Shakespearean. People who spend many millions of dollars on a chunk of luxury property one day seem to believe that chunk will be sellable the next for many millions more.

On Aug. 11, a limited liability corporation controlled by Charles Yassky, a developer and real estate investor, paid $13.2 million for a 36-foot-wide red-brick mansion at 122 East 78th Street.

The building, split into two floors of offices and three floors of small apartment units, went on the market two weeks ago for $18.  read more »

Leighton Candler, the Corcoran mega-broker who has the listing for Brooke Astor's Park Avenue co-op, just listed a full floor, nine-room, three-bedroom, 5,894-square-foot apartment at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South for $35 million. It's an ambitious listing for three reasons, but mostly because it's hard to sell anything expensive nowadays (especially if there are $8,770 monthly maintenance fees and $8,770 monthly taxes.)

Then there's the fact that the Ritz-Carlton doesn't have the social cache of 778 Park Avenue (Astor's building) or 1040 Fifth (where Ms. Candler is listing the penthouse for $46.5 million).

But consider that the apartment was bought only three years ago by one of the building's developers, Christopher M.  read more »

On Thursday, The Observer’s Web site reported that the city’s most expensive listing, an $80 million, 5,276-square-foot, 14-foot-tall, 9.5-room penthouse at Fifteen Central Park West, had come off the market. But the death of a gargantuan Fifteen Central Park West listing always means a fresh one has sprouted.

According to two sources, an 18th-floor duplex bought this March for only $23.5 million, with about 5,870 square feet indoors and 1,112 square feet of terrace space, is quietly asking $75 million. It’s next door to the better-known duplex that a biotechnology venture capitalist reportedly put on the market this year for $90 million.  read more »

During a week that’s so colossally momentous, what else is there to do but waste time perusing high-end real estate brokers’ Web sites, browsing for newsworthy new listings?

On Monday, this reporter was looking at independent broker Joanna Cutler’s site, where her biography says she “can be found dining with Mariska Hargitay, Maria Bello, or Lisa Marie, hanging out with Naomi Campbell, Carol Alt or Jennifer Aniston.” The site says she owns homes in the Time Warner Center, One Beacon Court and 15 Central Park West; but it was at the Plaza where she made headlines, claiming in February to have been stuck in a garbage room for seven hours, bloodying her hands “trying to claw her way out.  read more »

Anxiety has slowly crept into the normally high-chinned little world of Manhattan luxury real estate, though that doesn’t mean the very rich trying to unload very expensive New York apartments are actually getting desperate to sell. But maybe desperation is around the corner.

Consider Ramesh Singh, an executive at the huge Swiss-based bank UBS, who now has two huge Park Avenue apartments on the market—both listed at enormous discounts.

He’s spent years as the global head of mortgage-backed securities, the financial instrument that has more or less strangled the economy. Last month, after serious mortgage-related losses, UBS agreed to a multibillion-dollar government bailout.  read more »

One of Manhattan real estate’s most famous divorcées has a mammoth new penthouse, though the sprawl happens to be less than one-third the size of her ex-husband’s record-setting mansion.

According to a deed filed late last month, Bella Sapir, the ex-wife of billionaire Tamir Sapir—and the mother of Alex Sapir, president of the eponymous family real estate organization—just closed on a $8,895,000 penthouse at the new Veneto on East 53rd Street.

The 4,511-square-foot sprawl (not counting 1,095 square feet of outdoor space) was originally considered two units on offering plans. There are two hefty terraces: One, 51.5 feet long, is off the gargantuan living room/dining area (an NBA basketball court is just 50 feet wide); the second, about 27-by-11, has doors leading to a TV room and to an L-shaped master bedroom.  read more »

Bravo chief Lauren Zalaznick helped nationalize obsessiveness over real estate consumption--or at least her New York Times Magazine cover story this weekend said so: "Zalaznick’s innovation was to make the actual narrative itself about people selling stuff, and buying it too, whether it’s clothing, as on 'Real Housewives,' or real estate, on shows like 'Flipping Out.'"

Either God really does exist or a clerk at the New York City Department of Finance's Office of the City Register has a divine sense of humor, because on Friday afternoon, just as that cover story was starting to get read, a two-year-old deed for Ms. Zalaznick's $3.25 million apartment was filed in city records. The co-op, at the huge Stewart House on East 10th Street, has seven rooms, four bedrooms, an oversized formal dining room, a "large dramatic formal reception gallery," and a south-facing terrace, according to an old listing.

Normally, real estate sales are filed with the city within a month or so of the actual deal, though sometimes there are oddities--like two weeks ago, for example, when a March 2006 deed for National Review president Thomas L. Rhodes' $8.3 million co-op at 930 Fifth Avenue was suddenly filed.  read more »

Call up a posh uptown broker, the kind who actually rides to appointments in a chauffeured sedan, and ask how she’s coping with this financial trudge. She’s likely to pause thoughtfully, let out a polite but exasperated little sigh, and say that one can’t ever tell for sure what will happen, can one? Then comes a longer pause and she’ll tell you, with that slight Southern twang brokers all use, that it’s surely comforting there’s still one group of buyers willing to make awfully serious New York deals at this awfully uncertain time.

That group is not the massively wealthy; it’s the children of the massively wealthy.  read more »

Last October, a few months after the 81-year-old fashion designer turned real estate executive turned Showgirls producer Charles Evans died, his penthouse triplex at 895 Park Avenue went on the market for $29.5 million.

And it almost sold for the full asking price.

One year and three weeks later, after a second relatively excruciating near-sale, Mr. Evans’ 14-room, four-bedroom sprawl, already cut to $25 million at the end of May, is about to be cut again to $20 million, according to a source. As of this Tuesday, the listing on Stribling’s Web site—where floor plans show four fireplaces; four walk-in closets (plus a dressing room); two levels of massive terrace space; a master suite with its own bedroom-size study; one wet bar off the upstairs media room; and another bar off a downstairs gallery—had not yet reflected that price change.  read more »

You’d think that a broker with a $12 million listing would be slightly neurotic about selling it in this epically uneasy month, especially if that broker’s family happened to own the apartment. But Deborah Kern, a Corcoran broker who put her eight-room Majestic co-op on the market for $12 million last week, sounds calm.

“I’m not anxious,” she said Tuesday, reached at her office. “Honest to God, I’m not anxious.”

According to city records, she and her husband, James Kern, a former senior managing director at Bear Stearns, paid just $5.2 million in 2005 for the place, plus $160,000 for a maid’s room on the first floor of the twin-towered building.  read more »

Forget the Plaza duplex that Tommy Hilfiger put on the market for $50 million, and the $46.5 million Kress family's penthouse, and Brooke Astor's $46 million co-op, and the duplex that zinc magnate Bill Flaherty is listing for $43 million.

A source told The Observer yesterday evening that the monogram-shirted, meticulous uptown broker Edward Lee Cave is quietly taking offers on one of the most monumental apartments in New York. It's Courtney Sale Ross' duplex at 740 Park Avenue, the only residential building in New York with its own 559-page biography. Ms. Ross, a Texas-bred education philanthropist, is Time Warner creator Steve Ross' widow.  read more »

The Plaza has gotten a bad rap. Uptown types like snickering about those nouveau Russians who bought its redesigned condos; Andrei Vavilov, the ex-Yeltsin finance minister who’s unhappy with his Plaza triplex penthouse, has done a grand job of getting publicity for his lawsuit against developer El-Ad Properties; the building has been overshadowed by its primmer, New Yorker-profiled rival, 15 Central Park West. It doesn’t help that Jimmy Cayne, loathed chairman of Bear Stearns, closed on a $28.24 million spread as his firm tanked.

All the same, when a 16th-floor one-bedroom Plaza suite goes to contract by early November—brokers say a foreigner will be paying about $5.  read more »

Christopher Buckley, the only child of conservative godhead William F. Buckley, must have known he’d be offending certain sensibilities when he endorsed Barack Obama earlier this month: A slew of foamy e-mails followed; Mr. Buckley’s resignation from his late father’s National Review was offered; the resignation was accepted; life continued.

But, surely, Mr. Buckley had not considered the powers he’d be messing with when he spoke ill of the lofty $24.5 million price tag for his late parents’ famed Park Avenue maisonette apartment. In a big Times profile this Sunday, Mr. Buckley parenthetically offered these three tremendously treasonous words: “absurdly inflated price.  read more »