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New York Times publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. is not having a bright and shiny day. For one thing, the newspaper's buccaneer shareholder Harbinger Capital increased its pressure on the Sulzberger family's company by formally nominating its own four candidates to the paper's board of directors.

But in Manhattan, boardrooms aren't nearly as important as duplex co-ops. According to a deed filed in city records this afternoon, Mr. Sulzberger transferred ownership of his family's A-line duplex to his wife, the artist Gail Gregg, for $3,255,721. The apartment is in Harperley Hall, a stately pre-war co-op at 64th Street and Central Park West.

Ms. Gregg and her son, a reporter, would not comment. Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis, when asked if Mr. Sulzberger and his wife are separating, said this was done for estate-planning purposes and wouldn't comment further.

Why might a transfer like this make sense for estate planning? Real estate attorney Rob Frankel gave this scenario: "Let’s say I’m either older or more sickly, or we think I’m going to die first. There’s going to be an advantage to you if I owned it alone and left it to you, because you inherit it at the value at the time of my death, and you don’t have to pay taxes based on how much we bought it for."

It isn't clear from city records when this apartment was bought, but the couple has been in the building since at least 1992, city records show, when the market was a tad less excessive.

Two big sales in city records caught our eyes over the weekend, with price tags above $5 million (and, of course, one had to be in The Plaza):

• Lawyer Richard and Loretta Rosenbaum of Scarsdale purchased unit 703 in The Plaza for $8,741,976. We can't help but wonder how this suburban couple will get along with all the Russians. We have a call out to Mr. Rosenbaum.
• New York University Stern School of Business prof and Partner at Plainfield Asset Management Les Levi sold his 25 Central Park West condo for $7,060,000. The buyer is listed as Plutus NY, LLC.

Broadway actor Frank Langella closed on a $2.1 million, fourth-floor condo at 336 Central Park West Tuesday, according to city records. Mr. Langella won a Tony last year for his portrayal of former president Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon.

No one gets in Madonna’s way, especially not some stuffy Central Park West co-op board. It appears the world’s most famous Anglophile pop star will get to expand her 6,000-square-foot fiefdom in the decidedly Victorian sounding building Harperly Hall.

The Material Girl has closed on the $7 million, 7th floor unit, according to city records published today, which will bring the swank duplex that has been her New York headquarters for the past two decades to positively palatial proportions.

The apartment is by no means the trophy property in her bulging real-estate portfolio--she reportedly owns seven homes in the UK and a mansion in Beverly Hills--but it might be the most hard-won. Madonna sued the co-op board last December for blocking her purchase of a third apartment at 1 West 64th Street from her neighbor Julie Clark Thayer. Earlier this month she reportedly went to contract after settling the dispute.

Madonna has had beefs with co-op boards before—most notably when the San Remo refused to sell her and Sean Penn an apartment in the 1980’s. But Harperly Hall was only one of the B-list Central Park West buildings before the Material Girl moved in. The New York Times reported in 2003 that she drove property values in the whole building up about 25 percent, but also drew hordes of paparazzi, angering neighbors and forcing the lime-light hungry star to use the service entrance (gasp).

 

New York suffered a brutal blow to its ego last week when Madonna said she was totally over Manhattan. “It’s not the exciting place it used to be,” the singer said. “It still has great energy; I still put my finger in the socket. But it doesn’t feel alive.”

So when The Observer found a real estate record filed just this morning that said Bono and his wife Ali Hewson had sold their Central Park West apartment, it seemed crushing. Could Madonna and Bono both be abandoning New York in the same short span? No.

According to the $4.9 million deed, the co-op is Bono’s old 2,322-square-foot apartment at the El Dorado at 90th Street and Central Park West.

He first bought the place for $3.4 million, but left it five years ago for Steve Jobs’ old apartment at the San Remo down the block. (Mr. Jobs sold the place for around $14.5 million, less than the reported $15 million he spent on renovations that involved both Robert A.M. Stern and I.M. Pei.)

Even though Bono bought that co-op in April 2003, he put the El Dorado apartment on the market in March 2006 for $5.95 million, a brokerage database shows, though the price was reduced to $5.5 million in June. Instead of the 12-foot, 800-pound doors in his new co-op, this littler place has two petite bedrooms, a nicer-sized master suite, and a 320-square-foot terrace and living room facing Central Park. All that now goes, the deed says, to a couple from Westchester.

But life for Bono at the San Remo hasn’t been entirely perfect: He squabbled with neighbors, including lesser arena rock star Billy Squier, over hazardous smoke wafting up into his penthouse duplex.

Back in 1948, the radio bandleader Harry Salter and his wife Roberta Semple Salter, daughter of the scandalous California evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, moved into a rental at 322 Central Park West. About 15 years later, when the building went co-op, they paid $9,100 for the space.

Roberta died this January at age 96; and her family sold the six-room, 1,850-square-foot apartment for $2.95 million, according to deeds filed in city records this month.

“She decided to buy it against all advice,” Roberta’s daughter Victoria told The Observer last week. “Brokers, lawyers, friends, everybody said, ‘Roberta, you’re crazy’--because the Upper West Side was going to hell in a hand basket!” It turned out to be a good investment.

Speaking of hellfire, Roberta (at age 15) briefly preached at her mother Aimee’s L.A. church when Ms. McPherson disappeared. A month later, the mother surfaced in Mexico, saying she’d been kidnapped.

Roberta ended up marrying outside the faith. “My father was Jewish, and my mother came from this highly charged fundamentalist background,” Victoria said. But the Central Park West apartment was peaceful. “It was almost Zen-like, an extremely calm apartment… You felt warm and fuzzy about it.”

On the other hand, Roberta handled the mail for her husband Harry’s famous radio show, Name That Tune. “She hired a staff of people and set up a mini-production line in our dining room to pile through this mail,” Victoria said. “I think at one point we were getting 50,000 pieces of mail a week.”

Nowadays, that space is “finely appointed,” according to the Corcoran listing.

So far, the rumors of a Donald Trump-backed condo on the northwest corner of Central Park are greatly exaggerated.

Curbed related the rumor earlier this week that the Donald planned what would be one of the most significant residential developments in the city’s history because of its location along an edge of the iconic park that’s always seemed beyond the luxury pale.

The Observer did some digging and it looks like the rumor is just that, for now.

Carmie Elmore, the owner of the gas station at 110th Street and Central Park West where the condo’s rumored to be going, doesn’t sound like he is planning on giving up the space anytime soon.

“I am not interested in selling,” Mr. Elmore told The Observer. “A lot of people have approached me, but I am not selling.”

Has anyone with the last name Trump come calling?

“No.”

A representative for the developer also played down rumors of a development in that part of the city. “Trump is always looking for opportunities,” a spokesperson said. “At this time, though, there is no interest in that area.”

 

At long last, steely Dateline NBC co-anchor Stone Phillips has sold his triplex penthouse at the Oliver Cromwell, an 80-year-old Central Park West co-op. Mr. Phillips’ six-room apartment was first listed back in fall 2005 for $5.5 million.

But, according to city records, Mr. Phillips 27th-floor apartment sold for a bit less--$4,350,000--to a fashionable buyer: Fred Gehring, CEO of the Tommy Hilfiger Corporation.

Mr. Phillips, a former Yale University star quarterback, apparently liked to watch TV. According to the listing with the Corcoran Group’s Fran Davis, his old triplex has three large high-definition televisions, plus flat-screens in the floor-heated kitchen and the top-floor dressing room and master bathroom too.

Besides its television, that bathroom also has a windowed shower, in which, as Ms. Davis wrote, you can “feel the summer breeze.” Classy! Likewise, the wainscoted 25.5-foot-long dining room has leather-paneled walls; the planted, 300-square-foot terrace off the middle floor boasts an outdoor sound system for view-drenched serenading.

Mr. Stone and his wife Debra, a New York social worker, have reportedly upgraded to a $4.4 million, 4,100-square-foot loft on West 19th Street. On the downside, the newsman will no longer awake to the sun rising over Central Park.