Max Abelson

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 »

There wasn't a single free seat at the Friday night screening of Che at the Ziegfeld Theatre. A sign at the box office window informed attendees that the historic 1,131-seat theater was completely sold out.

Reviews for Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic of Latin American revolutionary and T-shirt model Ernesto "Che" Guevara (played by co-producer Benicio Del Toro) had been split—The Los Angeles Times' Sheri Linden called it "extraordinary and challenging"; The New York Times' A.O. Scott called it "epic hagiography" and dinged Mr. Soderbergh's politics as "naïve and fuzzy"—but the crowd seemed fully ready to sit through the complete movie—4 hours and 23 minutes, with a half-hour intermission in between.  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.

   read more »

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 »

Forget the news that doyenne broker Alice Mason is downsizing. The social diarist David Patrick Columbia caused quite a stir this morning by writing that massive Corcoran (and the gentlemanly Edward Lee Cave) are both shuttering. He wrote that both companies' top brokers are going to Brown Harris Stevens, which makes it easier to guess where the rumors might have come from.

"It's not true--of course it's not true. He doesn't even know what he's talking about," a Corcoran spokesperson just told The Observer about Mr. Columbia's rumor of the brokerage's demise. "He thinks Henry Silverman is still with the company." (Mr. Silverman, the founder and former CEO of Cendant Corporation, which bought Corcoran seven years ago, left relatively recently.  read more »

For Upper East Siders, the genuinely terrifying fact about the housing market isn't that one in 10 American home mortgages are now in distress, but that the city's daily massive co-op and condo and townhouse deals have seemingly been put entirely on hold. The townhouses at 1016 Madison and 22 East 71st Street listed for $75 million each? Both unsold. The $64 million mansion at 18 East 64th? Unsold. The $51 million duplex penthouse at Trump Park Avenue? Still unsold. The $50 million duplex at the Pierre? Not sold either.

But according to a deed filed this morning, something incredible happened last Wednesday: John A. Griffin, who had been billionaire Julian Robertson's right-hand man before he left to start his own hedge fund, Blue Ridge Capital, and his wife, Amy, have paid $32.25 million for a 10th-floor co-op at 1030 Fifth Avenue (pictured). The place hadn't even been on the market.  read more »

Poor Marc S. Dreier. The powerful, 58-year-old white-shoe laywer has been arrested in Canada on a charge of impersonation ("in connection," The Globe and Mail reports, "with a proposed multimillion-dollar agreement between the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and the financial company Fortress Credit Opportunities.") To add insult to injury, his law firm, with more than 250 attorneys in six cities, not to mention clients like billionaire Sheldon Solow, has canceled next Thursday's holiday party at the Waldorf-Astoria.

"Marc Dreier lives well," writes the legal blog Above the Law, which broke the story, "with a fabulous Manhattan apartment rumored to rent for $50,000 a month, plus a place out in the Hamptons."

Interestingly, city records show that, in August 2007, Mr. Dreier paid $5.425 million for a condo at the celeb-infested One Beacon Court, through a limited liability corporation. But those records also show that the IRS placed a $157,793.18 federal lien against Mr. Drier back in 2001, when his address was listed at The Sovereign on East 58th Street. He was released from the lien two and a half years later.  read more »

McMansion pioneers Toll Brothers Inc., our country's biggest luxury homebuilder, reported its bleakest annual results since going public during the Reagan administration. The company may deliver only 2,000 to 3,000 homes during fiscal 2009 (instead of this year's 4,743), which means the recently-posted $297.8 million fiscal loss will likely get worse before it gets better.

"Obviously, there are enormous challenges in our industry,” CEO Bob Toll said in a statement. His tone was different only a few months ago, during a feisty March interview with The Observer, excerpted below.

On the housing system: "The reason capitalism works is that one of the basic instincts of human nature is greed; everybody wants to get bigger, better, more, you know? And there are very few of us that walk around all day long with the thought of being our brother’s keeper."

On social responsibility: "No, I don’t think we’re feeling socially responsible not to sell homes. I think it’s on a business basis that we don’t want to sell homes to people that are going to fail, because we don’t want those homes back."  read more »

On the one hand, the news today that President George W. Bush has bought a 1.13-acre, 8,501-square-foot house in Dallas for $2.07 million must surely be raising some resentment in a nation where nearly one in four homeowners with mortgages currently owe more on their mortgage payments than their homes are worth. After all, Mr. Bush's post-presidency abode (above) not only has a 1,150-square-foot garage, 896-square-foot servants' quarters, and a bonus 240-square-foot storage space, but his next-door neighbor is literally a billionaire.

But, on the other hand, if Mr. Bush had chosen Manhattan as his post-White House place of residence, $2.07 million would barely buy him a condo the size of his new garage. Even with the market suffering, according to a gander at listings on StreetEasy, $2.07 million is just enough for a 1,091-square-foot Turtle Bay condo; a 1,612-square-foot place on West 58th Street; or a 1,743-square-foot condo on West 100th.

A few months ago, Candy Spelling decided to trade in her 56,500-square-foot French chateau-style home (with a gift-wrapping room) for a $47 million condo at the still incomplete Century condominium in Los Angeles. Her 16,500-square-foot place will spread over the building's top two penthouse floors.

But this Monday, the trustworthy and hilariously named Web site Real Estalker had a little post reporting that Ms. Spelling, whose TV mogul husband, Aaron, died two years ago, "has backed out" of the purchase. Her publicist denied the rumor yesterday (telling the site that Ms. Spelling's plans "have not changed"), and so has a spokesperson for the Century's developer, Related, who told The Observer today, "Just completely untrue."

But why would there be rumors about Los Angeles' biggest-ever condo deal? "No idea," the spokesperson said.

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 »

“Never having a real speaking role before, I’ve been having to work on my, you know, my enunciation, my articulation, things like that,” said 27-year-old Matthew Risch, the luckiest ex-understudy in New York City. It was the last day of November, and he was sitting in front of a bulb-lined mirror in his new dressing room at the Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54.

Nine days earlier, the actor Christian Hoff, 13 years Mr. Risch’s senior and poised for a breakthrough as the star of the retooled Rodgers and Hart mega-musical Pal Joey, injured his foot during a performance, according to an announcement issued by the theater.  read more »

“You can’t make somebody buy something. You just can’t make them. They’re not handing out shotguns to brokers yet,” the tall, blond, Georgia-bred, 47-year-old real estate broker Leighton Candler complained earlier this month. She was sitting in the wood-paneled library of a 14-room duplex penthouse at 1020 Fifth Avenue. “And to push is wrong, to be controversial is wrong, to be confrontational is wrong. It really is. These are very sophisticated people.”

Ms. Candler has several tectonic listings to worry about, including this penthouse, which she’s marketing for $46.5 million, down from last year’s $50 million tag. There’s the late Brooke Astor’s duplex on Park Avenue, for example, or a smaller penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue, for which a zinc magnate and his estranged wife are asking $43 million.  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 »

Coldplay is a band so spectacularly mediocre that not even Brian Eno, practically the best producer on Earth, could have saved their last album, Viva La Vida, from being both bland and pompous. But they're also so spectacularly mediocre that the album sold more downloads than any in the history of digital sales--all in two weeks.

And that means they get to live well.

According to city records, guitarist Jonny Buckland (whose name, bless his soul, is spelled like that on the deed) just paid $3.4 million for a condo at 21 Astor Place, a 116-year-old commercial building that was converted into 50 luxury loft condos. According to the listing, which calls the apartment "an opportunity for a true connoisseur," the place has 2,107 square feet, five rooms, two bedrooms, and two (and a half) bathrooms. More to come in tomorrow's Observer...

Remember 2006? When New York City was in the middle of its giddiest real estate run in the history of giddiness? Remember that the Corcoran Group's holiday party was set in a faux-Roman palace, decorated with lightly-dressed actors in vintage costumes? Around 900 people drank up and patted each other on the back and talked shop and smiled.

There will be no faux-Roman palaces this year.

"We decided not to have a holiday party quite a while ago," Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman told The Observer yesterday. "It's just not a responsible way to act right now."  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,

 read more »

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 »