Burly Ranger Scott Gomez Buys $3.2 M. Chelsea Duplex

Once, very long ago, Chelsea was not a place for 200-pound, $50 million hockey players. Stereotypes aside, it really used to be a svelte and wonderfully grubby place; lonely Leonard Cohen even wrote a song about the neighborhood hotel.

Those days are massively gone: The high-scoring center Scott Gomez, who fled the New Jersey Devils this summer to sign a seven-year contract with the New York Rangers, has bought a duplex penthouse at the Chelsea Mercantile on Seventh Avenue. According to city records, he paid $3.2 million.

Even though that NHL contract was for $51.5 million, Mr. Gomez, who won NHL’s rookie-of-the-year Calder Memorial Trophy in 2000, still took out a $2.24 million mortgage on the 2,062-square-foot apartment.

According to the listing with Sotheby’s broker Malcolm Beadling, his duplex has a 31-by-32-foot terrace, with views to the Hudson and his old Jersey homeland, where he won two championships. That terrace is “planted” but burly: There’s a built-in gas barbecue, an oven, plus a “drinks refrigerator.” In case Mr. Gomez prefers drinking indoors but doesn’t want to abandon the sun, his duplex has three skylights.

It isn’t clear from city records if the hockey star has ever had a Manhattan apartment, and the address listed on the sales deed is in his native Anchorage, Alaska. Alaska lacks duplexes with three bedrooms (each around 17 feet long) and those old-Hollywood bathroom mirrors bordered with light bulb strips; Chelsea still has a lot of those.

If the hockey player ever wants to make a movie about his new environs’ history, he should visit his neighbor Sheila Nevins. The HBO Documentary Films president just bought her second apartment in the building for $1.925 million, city records show.