Go Ahead and Stair

One day some wonderfully smart grad school student will write his doctoral thesis on postmillennial Manhattan luxury real estate marketing, and it will close with a grand metaphor on photographs of staircases. Stairs pack a symbolic wallop: Shots of the wide, high, well-carpeted, well-decorated and well-carved stairs in New York’s fanciest duplexes and townhouses represent our wildly relentless aspirations! And they’re nice to look at.

Photographs of staircases in expensive apartments tend to be terrifying. There’s apparently no rail to grab on the way up to the mezzanine in 345 Grand Street’s penthouse, where the stairs seem to be disconnected slabs hanging off from a wall. A picture of the $13,650,000 penthouse at Tribeca Summit on Greenwich Street makes that duplex look a tad less horrifying, but a lot taller. (The stairs in 3 East 94th Street look a lot safer, but the house will cost you almost $25 million.)

In person, a truly humongous staircase can be slightly unpleasant. During a cocktail party in the Clock Tower on Dumbo’s Main Street last month, this reporter and two friends clung shamefully to handrails as we got to the top of the very open triplex penthouse. The apartment’s $25 million tag is Brooklyn’s most expensive by far.

Some marketing photographs make staircases look downright bloodcurdling: The $28 million listing for the East 70th Street townhouse that belongs to Lois and Georges de Ménil, the collector Dominique de Ménil’s son, opens with a photo showing a long and Hitchcockian drop to the floor.

But what’s really wonderful about the best residential staircases is that they’re often unnecessary—grand homes tend to have high-speed elevators. Asher B. Edelman, the corporate raider who helped inspire Gordon Gekko, pointed out an unplugged Dan Flavin by his lift during an interview last year. —Max Abelson