Arizona Cardinals quarterback Tim Hasselbeck and his wife, Elisabeth, the blond, slightly annoying Survivor star-turned-View co-host, just bought a four-bedroom, 2,349-square-foot apartment at Ariel West, the new tower developed by Gary Barnett at Broadway and 99th Street. According to city records, they spent $3.25 million.

The floor plan says that two of the bedrooms, the 30-foot living/dining room, the family room, and the master bathroom are all lined against a massive wall of windows. Of course, that means there will be a nice view for the View co-host, which would have easily made for a nice pun-dripped headline—but there are times in every real estate writer's life when the opportunity to write genuinely idiotic double-entendres must be resisted.

In any case, it's not the first Upper West Side place for the couple. They spent $999,000 in 2005 on an apartment 20 blocks south, city recoreds show, which they haven't sold off yet. That place probably didn't have Ariel's über-condo bonuses like a 51-foot indoor pool, an outdoor basketball court, a pet grooming salon, billiards parlor, and an "elaborate" childrens' playroom, which will suit Ms. Hasselbeck's elaborate tastes.  read more »

The old French wings of the Rothschild family have inappropriate members and very appropriate members: 23-year-old Raphael de Rothschild was found dead from a heroin overdose in Chelsea a few years back, but then Baron Guy de Rothschild, who recently died at 98, threw balls at his country home with Dalí, and also fought the Nazis.

Baron Eric de Rothschild is the good kind of Rothschild. He helped bring the family bank back to France after it had been nationalized under Mitterrand, and has spent the past 34 years running the vineyards at Château Lafite Rothschild. And he just bought his painter wife, Maria-Beatrice Caracciolo Di Forino, a Village penthouse where she can do some work whenever they’re staying in New York.  read more »

Jeff Klein, the hotelier behind the prim City Club, doesn’t have much nostalgia for the gritty, arty days of the old Chelsea. “Not really,” he said from L.A.

So Mr.  read more »

The massive listing for the late Brooke Astor's duplex at 778 Park Avenue is finally online, and it's the kind of thing that real estate obsessives will salivate over for years. Leighton Candler, the broker who beat out four other super-powerful brokerages--read what Ms. Astor's daughter-in-law had to say about her here--put up four flowery interior shots, but the real keeper is the floorplan.  read more »

The news this week that a building super was keeping mail-order baby chickens at his luxury U.N.  read more »

The fiery death of New York real estate will look something like this: Bear Stearns executives will renege on the Upper East Side apartment contracts they signed before their firm’s collapse; finance guys at other firms, saddled with another round of nonsteroidal bonuses, will keep downsizing; foreign investors will get panicky and back out of Manhattan; Bloomberg will blubber; brokers will bawl.  read more »

Plump-lipped, long-legged, well-paid starlets that don’t worry about making any money from their real estate sales might be Manhattan’s only hope for reversing our absurdly high-climbing prices.  read more »

Thomas Struth, maybe the most sublime photographer alive, just bought his first apartment. This month, he and his wife, the writer Tara Bray Smith, paid $2.1 million for a two-bedroom apartment on East 67th Street, near Park Avenue, according to city records.  read more »

The real Gordon Gekko doesn’t own his New York home anymore. He rents.

Asher B.  read more »