Manhattan Transfers

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. Klein, a former socialite who went to Horace Mann, Riverdale, Dwight and then Columbia Prep, and whose partner is John Goldwyn (the Baby Mama producer, and grandson of the MGM mogul), just sold his house at 153 West 18th Street for $5.95 million, according to city records. He sold to three brothers named Tim, Matt and Jon Gold, who together run a lighting supplies company called Midtown Electric.

Mr. Klein would only talk to The Observer if this article made it clear he didn’t actually want the press—which is true. “Ugh! Mmm. Yes, I sold the house, whatever,” he said when first asked about the sale.

His tone has apparently evolved from a 2001 New York Times profile, when he said, “Jeff Klein is here, and I’m full, and I’m selling out at $500 a night, and all you wannabes, all you little boutique copycats, are going to go bankrupt.” (He no longer speaks in the third person, though earlier this year, while he was guest-blogging on The Times’ Web site for a week, he wrote about Heath Ledger the morning after he died, saying the actor had stayed at his hotel in L.A.)

Speaking from California this week, Mr. Klein said he hadn’t lived in the Chelsea house for years, and had been renting its spaces out—the penthouse duplex he’d once stayed in went for $8,000 a month. Despite those rents, he didn’t do much renovation work after buying in 1999 for around $1.2 million, though he fixed up the interior décor, and his roof garden had homegrown tomatoes and a shower.

One might think he would have wanted to take off the facade’s fire escape. “From the outside, it looked like poor people lived there, and when you walked in it was gorgeous,” he said.

One might also think that Mr. Klein would be more wistful about his neighborhood (even if carping about the bankers with strollers there now is like wondering when all the painters left Soho). “The truth is,” he said, “to beautify that building would have been rearranging the deck chairs while the Titanic was sinking. The building to the left of me is like this tenement building, the building to the right is a tenement.”

There’s also an old storefront for the Golds’ electrical supply company next door. In fact, the brothers own those properties on either side of Mr. Klein’s old building, which they’ll probably try to develop now, the hotelier said. But that wouldn’t bother him. “No! No, it hasn’t been my house for quite a while.”

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. Plaza condo wasn’t nearly as staggering as the news that a big-name widow had to sell her Fifth Avenue apartment to settle serious debts.

On Friday, The Observer’s Web site reported that Veronica Hearst, who married the late Randolph Hearst when he was in his 70s, after she was married to a Venezuelan leather goods mogul, would be selling off her co-op at 4 East 66th Street for around $30 million.

“It’s anticipated that the debts she’s incurred will be satisfied shortly,” a source said then, maybe referring to a reported $45 million she owes the lender New Stream Secured Capital. (The February foreclosure auction of her 52-room villa near Palm Beach, which sold for $22 million, helped, too.)

But at co-op buildings like Ms. Hearst’s, where deals are done in cash—without mortgages—and owners are often supposed to have maybe $100 million in liquid assets, fire sales simply don’t happen. “You find that people at River House are rather serious and not as exposed to the vicissitudes,” Ambassador Donald Blinken said last month about his co-op.

Even though the sale happened without an official listing, which means it might not have gotten full market price, Ms. Hearst’s neighbors don’t seem to be panicked. When The Observer called Lewis Sanders, chairman and CEO of AllianceBernstein and the co-op board’s president, his wife got on the phone.

“It’s a triple-A-plus building!” she said. “She has a gorgeous apartment and it’s sold at a top price. … And that’s all that can be said.”

Despite the board’s all-cash rule, New Stream comes up in co-op mortgage filings; a financing statement from September even says Ms. Hearst is indebted to a Georgia lender named Chapes-JPL. It isn’t clear if her co-op, or maybe jewelry, was taken as collateral. “Do you live in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and need money fast?” its Web site says. “If so, Chapes-JPL will do loans for out-of-state customers.”

If Ms. Hearst had been forced to foreclose on her co-op shares, would any hoi polloi auction buyer have been able to move in? “A co-op board is not required to accept anybody,” said John Sicree, the building’s managing agent, who wouldn’t discuss Ms. Hearst.

It isn’t clear where the widow and her reported housemate, socialite daughter Fabiola Beracasa, will go in the meantime. “She’s decided to move to another residence,” said Ms. Sanders, who doesn’t know who the Hearst buyer will be. “You really don’t see people. This is like living in a building alone, as opposed to living with others,” she said. “Affluent people prefer that.”

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.

But when Bear Stearns senior managing director Bill Bamber and his wife closed in February on their new apartment at Third Avenue around 92nd Street, it was good timing. Five weeks later, his firm and its stock collapsed. According to city records filed last week, the executive and his wife paid $1,995,000 million for a new two-unit, four-bedroom condo with views of the George Washington Bridge, the Triborough, and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.

“Yes, it was a great trade,” Mr. Bamber said in an e-mail. “We sold all the Bear Stearns stock we could to help fund the purchase & renovations to the Condo.”

His old chief executive Jimmy Cayne did even better, buying a $28.24 million spread at the Plaza before his firm’s stock fell from a high of around $170 to $2.84.

But the Bambers’ lawyer on the deal, Paul Herrick, has other clients that aren’t doing as well. “I’ve got a couple of other Bear Stearns guys, they’re in tough spots,” he said. Those two might not close on their apartment contracts, signed before the collapse, which would mean they’d lose their deposits. (On the bright side, their lawyer said that finding a legal way to back out with their deposits is not impossible, “when you really start to tear apart a contract.”)

But even if a Bear executive is solid enough to go through with his apartment deal, there’s still trouble. “It’s like, O.K., I have enough assets to finish this transaction,” the lawyer said. “Then the next question is, ‘Will I have enough income after I’ve closed that I can realistically afford this place?’”

Things were different last July, when Mr. Bamber smiled and clapped with fellow Bear executives as they rang the New York Stock Exchange’s closing bell, celebrating something called the BearLinx Alerian MLP Select Index ETN. Even in October, financial difficulties were something to laugh at: “Times being tough at Bear,” he reportedly said during a badly illustrated presentation, “I had to rip off the top graphic from a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale.”

These days, his real estate lawyer is reminded of an earlier New York catastrophe: “Nine-eleven was an example of people trying to get out of contracts,” Mr. Herrick said. “The only business we had for a week was people trying to get out of contracts.”

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.

According to city records, 23-year-old Scarlett Johansson just sold her duplex loft at 66 Leonard Street for $1,898,000, even though she paid $1,950,000 back in January 2006. That kind of loss, even if it’s just $52,000, is basically unheard of: Consider that an apartment at 15 Central Park West that closed last December for $6.9 million was resold in March for twice that amount, $13.8 million.

Usually it takes a billionaire to be blasé about luxury real estate. When Slim-Fast founder S. Daniel Abraham’s family sold a $14 million uptown spread for just $700,000 more than they’d paid a few years back, a family member told The Observer: “A lot of thought did not go into this, you know. We’re not looking for the last dollar in every investment.”

If Ms. Johansson doesn’t share that charming financial ennui, she needs a better real estate agent. According to brokerage databases, the apartment’s listing was handled by her 31-year-old brother, Adrian. He didn’t return calls to his cell phone.

The actress must have been hoping for a profit when the duplex went on the market in May for $2.195 million. According to that listing, a lofted bedroom looks out onto the 22-foot-high living room and its limestone fireplace. Then there are blond Hollywood details like hand-painted Tuscan walls, Brazilian cherry wood floors and a master bathroom with a five-fixture shower and “European pod-shaped soaking tub.”

The buyer is Richard Gormley, who was hired by Lazard in 2006, as a managing director, to lead the very significant-sounding alternative capital finance group. “I’m only comfortable saying so much, but basically I lived next door; it was simply a question of expanding if the apartment was available,” he said in between meetings in L.A.

“I approached them initially. It took a while to agree to the terms of the deal.” When this reporter pointed out that Mr. Gormley bought the duplex for less than his seller had paid—a Manhattan real estate dream—he snorted, “And?”

Ms. Johansson, who stars in her third Woody Allen film this year, won’t be ruined by her $52,000 loss to that finance guy: She can comfort herself in the seven-bedroom L.A. house she bought last year for $7 million.

When The Observer wrote on Friday that Veronica Hearst was selling her Fifth Avenue apartment for around $30 million to help pay off some big debts, we pointed out that one of her lenders is an Atlanta party named Chapes-JPL. Tomorrow's paper has a lot more on Ms. Hearst (and Chapes too), but in the meantime, here's one of the many Chapes ads Ms. Hearst might have seen.

 

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.

“That was a big deal for me, especially because it’s such a big thing with the board package and everything, the whole process,” Mr. Struth said yesterday from Düsseldorf. The board, three people somewhere around their mid-70s, was probably at least slightly happy that their buyer had a glorious 2003 solo show at the Met, which made him the first living artist to show work in the museum’s Great Hall.

It’s slightly odd that an artist type would want a tasteful little co-op with original brass details, Parquet de Versailles floors in the dining room, and random-width oak floors (and a wood-burning fireplace) in the living room. But Mr. Struth’s photographs, of museum tourists or turtlenecked families, are famous for their grand simplicity and immaculate order. “I think it’s inevitable that what you surround yourself with reflects what your work is like, and vice versa,” he said in his slow, thick German accent. “It would be very strange if my studio or my apartment would be totally chaotic.”

The couple will spend four or so months of the year here, though Mr. Struth won’t be taking New York snapshots. When asked about his image of Crosby Street in the ramshackle ’70s, he said, “It’s difficult, to me, to come back to someplace where I did something important. I doubt whether I will do any street photographs again in New York. That was ’78—very extensively and intensively—and that was that.”

Ms. Smith, who spent nine years in New York, including Williamsburg, before she moved to Düsseldorf, said going to the not-so-artsy Upper East Side is “very frontier-ish.” But her seller, Corcoran’s Sharon Held, who also listed the apartment, spent $1.825 million for a penthouse in Williamsburg. Her husband works in finance. “You can imagine, this is a change,” she said.

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

Asher B. Edelman, the corporate raider-turned-art dealer, and an inspiration for the slick-haired, suspender-wearing, greed-loving Gekko from Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, has been leasing the white, almost-Spanish-style townhouse at 134-136 East 74th Street for years.

It isn’t because he can’t afford to buy: “I’ve owned a lot in New York in the past,” explained Mr. Edelman, wearing a golf-themed tie as he sat in his 95-shelf library on Monday. “To me, it’s been very clear that the market has been over-inflated—it’s still over-inflated.”

“Gisselle!” he yelled to an assistant. “Can I have a copy of the recovery plan?” He was referring to something he wrote for Senator Barack Obama, which he said might explain why he rents a house for his family and gallery offices instead of owning. As it turned out, the document is about illiquidity and mortgages, and it was hard for this reporter to understand.

But Mr. Edelman has a more immediate concern: A new landlord. According to city records, his house sold for $12 million this month, from longtime owners to the real estate magnate Laurence Gluck.

Mr. Gluck is known for buying up lower-income apartments, even old Mitchell-Lama buildings, not uptown mansions. “I was thinking of moving some excess Section 8 people to Park and Lexington,” Mr. Gluck chuckled, referring to the technical term for subsidized low-income housing. “I’m just joking,” he added.

Actually, Mr. Edelman got a new one-year lease for “a little more” than $20,000, Mr. Gluck said. Eventually, the ex-raider and a rare-book dealer on the first floor may both have to leave. “I want to restore the building, and then I’ll take it year by year,” the landlord said. He might even move in himself.

In the meantime, his arty tenant will enjoy the old house while he’s there. “We have a lot of fun with it, we run it like a salon,” said Mr. Edelman, who, over some four-day spans, has up to 200 people over for art and dinner.

He pointed out an unplugged Dan Flavin installation in a corner by the elevator, which takes you up to the private quarters, then identified a Frank Stella on the living room wall.

“I’m not into art,” said his 9-year-old son, who likes heavy metal. When Mr. Edelman settles into his new gallery on East 63rd Street, where a Dennis Oppenheim show debuts next month, his old downstairs office in the rented house will become a music room for his son.

“I’m almost 70,” said Mr. Edelman, who once taught a Columbia M.B.A. class called “Corporate Raiding: The Art of War,” “so I go with the flow.”

When a handsome young couple listed a Little Italy townhouse for $18 million earlier this month, even though they spent $1.5 million to buy it in June 2004, it made a nice little statement about the grand voraciousness in the downtown real estate universe.

Uptown wants in, too.

Brian Brille, the global head of investment banking for Bank of America, and his wife, Leslie Simmons Brille, have listed their red-brick neo-Georgian mansion at 117-119 East 69th Street for $32 million. They bought the place for just $12.4 million in May 2005, and haven’t slept a night there.

“We spent two years making an amazing set of plans to build a very special family home,” Ms. Brille said. “It had been not a family home for quiet a while—we were going to bring it back to that glory.” (It had belonged to Muppets creator Jim Henson and his company, who paid $600,000 for the place in 1977. Oddly, the Hensons bought from the New York State Pharmaceutical Association, which had converted the house into offices in 1951.)

Now the Brilles have two young children. “I just personally don’t have the ability to manage the renovation,” their mother said. “I’m done. I don’t want to do any more plans.” As for Mr. Brille: “He decided he wants a doorman,” listing broker Carrie Chiang said Monday, when news of the listing was broken on The Observer’s Web site.

Ms. Brille conceded that the house is nothing but a nice clean shell, but she said the $32 million asking price—$19.6 million more than the couple paid—was justified. “Between the cleaning up, developing plans and looking where the market is, that led us to our decision.”

“It’s a raw space,” their broker said, “but it has the most gorgeous staircase. And you’re looking into the back of Woody Allen’s house.”

On the downside, the Department of Buildings has a stop-work order on the building, according to city records. That has “something to do with some permit; I’m not even sure what it is,” Ms. Brille said. “I can’t even explain what it is, but it will be cleared by the time we sell.”

If billionaires replace all the comedians in Manhattan, will laughter die? Or will the rich just sit around guffawing simply because they’re rich?

At the Central Park West glass monolith Trump International, Carol Burnett, who turns 75 this week, sold her apartment this month for $5.58 million, city records show. It’s a two-bedroom, 1,945-square-foot sprawl, according to the listing, with crown moldings, custom closets, “contemporary furnishings” and a sweet sound system, too.

As it turns out, Ms. Burnett, whose glorious old CBS sketch show won 22 Emmys, isn’t a stranger to high-end real estate. Forbes reported in 2001 that she was trying to sell her one-story, seven-bedroom house in Montecito, Calif., for $36 million, although years later a Times profile said she still lived there, keeping a Manhattan apartment as well.

As Ms. Burnett leaves the condo tower, an Asian real estate titan moves in. Twenty-four floors up, a six-bedroom, 6,360-square-foot apartment sold, according to city records, for a tad over $26 million.

The buyer is the Japanese real estate mogul Katsumi Tada. “The people are the wealthiest people in the world in my buildings, far wealthier than you have in most co-ops,” Mr. Trump told The Observer last month. What about in the Central Park West condo? “We have everybody living over there, you have Mel Karmazin,” he said. “We have Jack Welch.” (Actually, Mr. Welch moved out, but there are still billionaires like Mark Cuban and Robert Wood Johnson IV, two sports team owners.)

Mr. Tada is worth a reported $1.8 billion, but he may have a lot more soon. Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs have all reportedly bid for a stake in his Daito Trust Construction Co. The value of a buyout deal could be around $10 billion, but that doesn’t mean the mogul will be able to buy a Burnett sense of humor. “Mr. Tada’s hobby is an ordinary one,” a spokesman once said, explaining his boss’ preference for golf over art, “because he is just an ordinary man.”

Ricky Kenig is a dramatic man. In February 2006, the beauty and costume shop kingpin spent $1,375,000 on a nice little Park Slope brownstone at 409 Eighth Street, and then he obsessively, expensively, tremendously and fluorescently gut-renovated it.

“I’m real anal,” Mr. Kenig, a divorced father of teen girls and a baby, said about his restoration tastes. “It’s like the worst thing.”

For example, his front door’s motion detector causes the huge top step to light up for visitors. But what color? “I just have the regular eco-friendly white one.” Inside are even fancier dimmable florescent lights: “You can’t get it in America; I got them from Austria. I’m the only one with it.” He’s also the only one with a collection of 96 vintage copper Chinese mannequin heads, caged in metal and drilled into a front wall.

But even though it’s been just two years and two months since he bought the brownstone, Mr. Kenig is already putting it on the market, for $3.2 million, with the broker Aaron Lemma. “I don’t need 3,300 square feet for a single father, that’s the main thing. If I had a girlfriend and I had live in-help—that’s what this is designed for—it would be a lot easier.”

“One thing I do know is whoever purchases this house is going to be a pig in shit,” Mr. Kenig said, “because all of what I did is worth so much money to not go through.” Not all of Park Slope’s stroller-pushing renovators put in a three-story magnetized wall along the stairwell, or a video monitor system (“I just have a few hidden—one in the back, one in the front, and one on the roof—more like a mental relief”), or three Kohler Purist Hatbox toilets. “I even bought a fourth one as a backup,” Mr. Kenig said about his $3,198.80-and-up bathroom trophies. “I keep it in the basement. I definitely have issues.”

Besides the financial strain of a taste for hatbox toilets, or, say, ionized and tempered glass, Mr. Kenig’s renovations took a mental toll, too. There was that time he was forced to take a hammer to his custom-made, stick-like Philippe Starck shower because it just wasn’t quite right. “It was off by an inch. It was a fucking inch! It was actually three inches. And I couldn’t handle it.”

Still, he’ll start a brand-new project in Brooklyn when he sells the place, he said, although it won’t be this glamorous. He’ll miss his old top-floor master bedroom suite, with its wall for his gargantuan sneaker collection, a hefty aluminum dresser and dashes of black mirrored glass.

And his 14-year-old twin daughters will probably be upset to leave their own full floor, where their bedrooms are connected by a sliding-door TV room. They also have an office, but it’s the only room in the house not wired for music, Mr. Kenig said, for when the tutors come. On the bright side, the twins’ glossy green bathroom has a radiant heat grass-print floor. “Anything that my kids wanted to change, we changed,” he said, “and upgraded even more.”

S. Christopher Meigher III, the well-bred, well-connected, well-tanned chairman and CEO of society magazine Quest, is not the kind of New Yorker whose name appears in public notices for co-op auctions.

But an Upper East Side broker who apparently likes leafing through The Observer’s legal section found a recent notice for an exclamatory sale—“BY VIRTUE OF DEFAULT”—of Mr. Meigher’s two-unit apartment at 164 East 72nd Street.

An auction was scheduled for this Thursday, at 12:30, at the front steps of New York’s Supreme Court, “in satisfaction of an indebtedness in the principal amount of $853,461.55 plus interest.” There was even an auctioneer picked out, a scary-sounding Lawrence Estreich.

Has the publisher, whose magazine’s “Fresh Finds” section currently features a $22,000 Girard-Perregaux pink gold watch with an alligator strap, fallen victim to the nationwide mortgage crisis? Not quite. “I wish there was a story,” Mr. Meigher told The Observer. “It was kind of a boneheaded game of chicken on a re-fi”—meaning that he and his wife tactically withheld a few mortgage payments because they disagreed with their bank.

“We felt we understood the terms one way, and they”—that would be HSBC Mortgage Corporation—“felt they understood it another way, and we, through pretty good advisers, got them to understand,” he said.

“We got the rate we wanted with the bank, the same bank, so I can’t complain,” he said. “All’s well that ends well.” That means the auction has been canceled, Mr. Estreich won’t be needed, and Mr. Meigher will keep an apartment that reportedly is decorated with canoes, oars and animal heads on the walls.

When very rich New Yorkers put their plush Manhattan real estate on the market for many millions more than they paid, it’s spectacularly easy to really loathe the sellers.

(Consider that liquor heir Edgar Bronfman Jr. bought a Fifth Avenue co-op this year for $19.5 million and put it on the market a week later for $24 million; or that a handsome young couple just began asking $18 million for a Little Italy house that cost them $1,512,000 in 2004.)

But it’s impossible to begrudge Dan Lufkin, the well-liked investor and longtime environmental philanthropist, for putting his heavenly five-bedroom spread at 455 Central Park West on the market this week for $17.5 million, just about three times what he paid three years ago.

For one thing, that’s because Mr. Lufkin is the type of kindly septuagenarian who uses your first name a lot in conversation (“well, Max, that’s right”) and says things like “dynamite,” “really super” and “a terrific gal,” especially when he’s describing his young wife, Cynthia, who began battling breast cancer a few years ago, seven months into a difficult pregnancy.

“You cannot get up sour in that apartment, because it’s so beautiful, and it’s so encompassing,” Mr. Lufkin said. “You can’t get up and say, ‘Goddamn it, what’s going on here?’ You say, ‘Jesus, what a nice day.’”

Besides the likable Lufkin couple themselves, there’s also the fact that their apartment happens to be a converted 19th-century chapel. Back in 2005, Mr. Lufkin paid $546,900 for a downstairs maid’s room and $5.775 million for the triplex chapel space in the old New York Cancer Hospital, which a Chicago developer was turning into condos.

“We said, ‘Wait a minute, stop. Don’t do a thing.’ And we basically tore out what they’d done,” Mr. Lufkin said. “We started with the idea of restoring the old church, just saving it”—its antique French oak floors, arched windows on the park, gold-leafed walls, stone columns, Gothic fireplace and, especially, 28-foot-high vaulted living room.

When asked if the three $15,000 globe lamps hanging from that main chapel space will leave the apartment when the family goes, Mr. Lufkin seemed to have an epiphany. “No! Nor will the televisions, nor the sound system—all that, in my judgment, goes in the apartment. I am not about to start tearing it apart.”

And when pressed about his renovation costs, he said, “I don’t think you’d be wrong if you said $3 to $5 million.” That still leaves enough for a nice profit, although profit isn’t why the Lufkins are leaving. “Her lungs are not 100 percent, so we decided to spend a year in the country,” Mr. Lufkin said about his wife. “And we liked it a lot.”

The listing broker is Sotheby’s International Realty’s Nikki Field, who wouldn’t comment for the story.

Brooke Astor’s duplex at 778 Park Avenue, a perfectly trimmed, scarlet-lacquered, canonical Upper East Side abode, officially has a broker, eight months after Astor’s death at age 105.

Her 83-year-old son Anthony D. Marshall, who has pled not guilty to charges that he stole from his ailing mother, sat down with his wife, Charlene, in the inherited duplex just a few weeks ago to interview brokers from five of the city’s top brokerages. They picked Leighton Candler, the Georgia-accented Corcoran senior vice president.

“Oh, very easy!” Ms. Marshall told The Observer when asked about the decision. “She’s very attractive, she’s very nice, she works well with other people. … She’s smart, she’s dynamic, she works hard. She’s very funny, she’s from the South—yay! Good girl, like me.” (Ms. Marshall has a nice soft twang, too).

If it weren’t for the famous court papers filed by Astor’s grandson, Philip, which claimed she was wallowing in the cold duplex in torn nightgowns, the apartment would have a gleaming, glinting provenance. Still, thanks to Astor’s decades as a Park Avenue deity, not to mention Albert Hadley’s legendary scarlet library, the apartment could very well sell near its $46 million price once it hits the market around late next week.

Ms. Candler happens to be the broker that brought hedge-fund star Scott Bommer and his wife to an uncombined duplex at 1060 Fifth, which sold in January for $46 million exactly, a co-op record. At the Bommers’ old building, 1040 Fifth, Ms. Candler sold Jackie Onassis’ old $30 million apartment for billionaire oilman David Koch in 2006.

“And then, of course, I represented the Lehman estate at 2 East 67th Street,” Ms. Candler said. She also tried but failed to sell pornographer Bob Guccione’s uptown mansion, though she said that wasn’t mentioned in her Astor interview because it wasn’t a co-op.

After that talk, the Marshalls asked for a record of Ms. Candler’s sales from the last four years. “We just trotted out there and printed it out. This was quite factual, it wasn’t, ‘Did I tap-dance better than anyone?’ They were very judicious. And of course they cared very much that you’re someone who would present the property well and speak well and all those nice things.”

The place will need just a tad bit of work. “Probably very little, you know, washing the windows and dusting the furniture,” Ms. Candler said. Potential buyers haven’t been in yet, but old visitors to the apartment from Astor’s entertaining days have made quiet inquiries. “Because the news hasn’t reached Europe, I think, the first calls have been from wonderful New York families.” But are they on par with the Astors? “Is anyone on par with the Astors?” the broker said.

As it happens, she comes from Atlanta’s Coca-Cola Candler family, though she had never been to the apartment before. “I unfortunately did not travel in Brooke Astor’s social circles,” she said. “I was never invited to tea with the pope.”

A hit children's TV show will take you far in this town. Dora the Explorer co-creator Eric Weiner and wife Cherie Vogelstein, a playwright, have bought a high-floor, seven-room condo at Ariel West, the new glass tower on West 99th Street and Broadway. According to city records, they paid $4.395 million.

Besides their four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom, 2,881-square-foot apartment, the Upper West Side writer couple will have an in-building spa, plus a 51-foot-long swimming pool--though, you know, what self-respecting Upper West Side writer couple doesn't have one of those nowadays?

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If it wasn’t piercingly clear that Manhattan’s ego hasn’t been dented by the enduring national economic calamity, nothing sends a message of gusto like one of the most expensive listings ever in the city’s most expensive ZIP code.

The house at 2 North Moore Street, on the corner of West Broadway, went on the market this week for $35 million, exactly $29,425,000 more than mortgage executive Steve Schnall and wife Sherri paid for the property in June 2005, city records show.

Back then the building was in a much different state, mostly known for housing jam band shows at the NoMoore Bar. The Schnalls built a new six-story building on the site, and connected it smoothly with the former bar, a two-story landmark.

What they got was 11,300 square feet, five bedrooms, a deck off the master suite, a three-car garage, a high-speed hydraulic elevator, three fireplaces, an art studio, a playroom, a screening room, a gym and, of course, a windowed 47-foot-long heated indoor lap pool. “We’re really humble, believe it or not,” Ms. Schnall said in a local news story on the plans.

The single-family house is on the market before the construction has even been finished—and long before neighbors would have thought. “I remember a large part of the presentation was that these people intended to be part of the community,” said Bruce Ehrman, a co-chair of Community Board 1’s Landmarks Committee and a real estate broker. “This was for personal use.”

Things change. Back in 2003, Mr. Schnall told The Times that things had “taken off” for the firm he started, New York Mortgage Company, and that he needed recruiters to get all the new staff he needed. Then this year, Mr. Schnall announced his resignation from the firm, which had been bought out by one of the country’s largest residential lenders for $13.4 million.

Mr. Schnall didn’t respond to calls left in New York and the Hamptons, and listing broker Deborah Grubman, a top broker at Corcoran, would say only that the house won’t be ready to show until June. “We’re going to sort of try to wait before we take in brokers and everybody else,” she said.

Appraiser Jonathan Miller and Corcoran broker Jim Brawders both said that the $35 million asking price is the neighborhood’s most expensive single-family townhouse listing ever. “I have some titans of industry looking right now in Tribeca,” said Mr. Ehrmann, the broker and community board member, “people who have as much money as anyone, and their budget is not $35 million.” Then again, there are few Tribeca spaces with heated indoor lap pools.

News of the listing was first reported yesterday on the Web site Curbed.

After you’ve sold your diet products company to a multinational conglomerate for around $2.3 billion, pinching pennies from apartment sales is no longer important.

So even though an investment group belonging to Slim-Fast founder and philanthropist S. Daniel Abraham’s family paid $13.3 million for two apartments at the East 65th Street condo tower Bristol Plaza (one came in April 2005, the other in April 2006), they sold them both off for just $14 million last month, city records show.

“A lot of thought did not go into this, you know; we’re not looking for the last dollar in every investment,” said a source involved with the family deal. “And this was a transaction that made sense for us, and with people that we wanted to sell to, so nothing magical here.”

The buyer is a group called Bolefin Corp., according to city records, and the sellers are named as Tammy A Inc.

The Abrahams’ listing with Corcoran had been for $17.5 million—so the family must have once hoped to turn a nice profit on the two units, which were reportedly bought as family pied-à-terres. Then again, they didn’t combine the condos, which would have helped boost their sales price: Together, the units would make for a full-floor, 13-room, five-bedroom, eight-bathroom, 5,678-square-foot sprawl.

Mr. Abraham’s real estate deals have made headlines before. He paid his friend Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, a reported $2.7 million for his Jerusalem home, which news reports suggested was inflated. (Mr. Olmert has also been accused of having intervened in the sale of Israel’s Bank Leumi on behalf of Mr. Abraham and another friend.)

But the source said there was nothing exciting about the Bristol Plaza sprawl. “I think basically it stayed empty—nothing mysterious!”

The disturbingly handsome couple Robert and Cortney Novogratz has spent the last 12 years buying rundown houses, renovating them in a style they call “vintage nouveauxx,” and then selling them for disturbingly massive profits.

Last week, their house at 5 Centre Market Place, which they purchased in June 2004 for $1,512,000, hit the market for $18 million, well over 10 times what they paid less than four years ago. The brokers are Corcoran’s Cornelia Dobrovolsky and Wendy Sarasohn.

“Is it high? For sure,” said Mr. Novogratz. “But it’s once in a lifetime to get on a block like this.”

Actually, he and his wife have owned four houses on Centre Market Place, a slim stretch below Broome Street on the western edge of Little Italy, next to the mammoth Police Building. They paid a reported total of $5.3 million for 5 Centre and three of its neighbors (they tried to buy a fourth, but the owner wouldn’t sell) back before the couple helped make the block into a row of insanely pristine townhouses.

They flipped one to a bachelor investor named Brad Zipper, building him a custom walk-in stainless steel wine refrigerator. Mr. Novogratz said Mr. Zipper paid around $5 million in cash for the house before its renovation was finished—“pretty ballsy.”

According to city records, they sold the other two houses on the block for just $2.1 and $2.6 million in 2005, although the Novogratzs’ company—Sixx Design, named for their six cherubic kiddies—didn’t do much interior work on them, and they’re much smaller.

But 5 Centre, a former gun shop, was given an outdoor basketball court encased in a steel mesh dome built in Switzerland. If you walk down the white oak-and-steel staircase—made in Belgium—you’ll get to the kitchen, where the back wall is a retractable glass door. “It’s very clean,” Mr. Novogratz said.

On the downside, what Mr. Novogratz called “a super-high-end art collection” doesn’t come with the house. The art’s there because the family happens to live in 5 Centre, though they’ll move out to their new project on the West Side Highway when a buyer moves in. “We were offered $100,000 rent for it last summer by one of the top two or three actors in the world,” he said. “It was funny, he flew here twice and we turned him down.”

Mr. Novogratz’s six kids wouldn’t have been sad to leave. “They’re not moving from a big house to a small house; they’re moving from a big house with a basketball court to a big house, probably with a basketball court.”

He said his wife was in the shower and couldn’t comment.

What’s their work relationship like? “It depends on the day you ask me. Actually, we get on very well. We have our fights. But we get over them in a second.”

Either way, Rizzoli is putting out a book on them next April. “It’s going to be kick-ass,” Mr. Novogratz said. He used the same phrase to describe a boutique hotel on the Jersey Shore they’re designing.

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.  read more »

Andy Roddick can serve a ball 155 miles per hour, faster than anyone in the history of professional tennis. For that reason, and one or two others (the 25-year-old’s forehand is good, he’s good-looking), he just got engaged to a 20-year-old bikini model named Brooklyn—you may remember her from the last two Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues. And, less noisily, he just bought his first Manhattan apartment.

The condo, at East 22nd Street near Gramercy Park, was listed for $1.195 million with Elliman’s Tamir Shemesh, who wouldn’t comment. According to his listings, the apartment is in an old brewery, which seems proper for a 20-something athlete.  read more »

Ricky Martin has sold nearly 70 million albums, and because of that absurd accomplishment he owns a $6.3 million apartment at 40 Bond Street, the glittery green condo developed by hotelier Ian Schrager.

Princeton alum Naomi Waletzky (class of ’98), who sings as Muffy Nixon, has not sold that many copies of her album Freakshow, which features radio rock tunes with names like Shoulda Known and Planet Earth.

But she’s Laurence Rockefeller’s granddaughter, which makes her the great-great-grandchild of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller. So her new apartment at 40 Bond is higher than Mr. Martin’s, by five floors, and much bigger—3,288 square feet instead of 2,637, and four bedrooms (with a study) instead of three.

According to a deed filed last week, it cost $9.25 million. There’s no record of a mortgage, which suggests she paid in cash.

Ms. Waletzky’s name is on the deed, but she bought it under Planet Earth LLC. “Space cadet, are you there/ You’re getting close with time to spare” is the opening line to her song Planet Earth. The chorus goes a little something like this: “You can crash on me/ You can crash on her/ So wake up from your fantasy/ Welcome back to planet Earth.”

According to floor plans, the master bathroom suite has a 14-foot-long “dressing gallery” with its own closet, a separate walk-in closet and a windowed bathroom. But the best space is the gargantuan living room, anchored by a wood/gas fireplace custom-designed by the building’s Pritzker-winning Swiss architects, Herzog & de Meuron.

Whether or not industrialist genealogy makes it easier to buy $9.25 million apartments, Ms. Waletzky told W in 2005 that her Rockefeller-ness hadn’t helped in music: “Doors were literally slammed in her face, record deals fell through, gigs were canceled, and ‘other bands were really mean to me.’”

In 2006, monolithic contemporary art collector Adam Lindemann bought Jeff Koons’ 3,500-pound Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold) from the dealer Larry Gagosian for a reported $4 million. A year later, cruelly, he sold it back to him for $23.5 million.

It’s probably good that he and his wife, Amalia Dayan, don’t have the nine-foot-tall super-pop effigy anymore, because it almost certainly wouldn’t fit in the weirdly miniscule townhouse they just bought at 64 East 77th Street. According to city records, a holding company in Ms. Dayan’s name (and signed by an associate of Mr. Lindemann’s) paid $5.2 million for the house. Their seller is Georgia Rockefeller Rose.

The 12.5-foot-wide brick-front house was bought for Ms. Dayan’s private art dealership, which apparently won’t be hurt by architectural skinniness. “The thinness, the size and the scale are actually what attracted her to the building,” said an assistant, Alissa Bennett. “It’s quite special.”

But when the Old Master gallerist Richard Feigen signed a multiyear lease for the house about nine years ago, he never officially moved in. “First of all, it’s tiny, and it’s extremely narrow. I don’t know what got into me when I rented it,” he told The Observer.

He tried to renovate, but eventually sublet the place for less than his rent, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Amalia’s a friend of mine, and Adam! I wished they talked to me,” he said when told that the house had sold to the arty couple. “The scale of the work she’s involved in—it would be very hard to get access there.”

That won’t stop Ms. Dayan, the granddaughter of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. “Of course we’ll be showing works in the building; there are several floors, and there will be a new elevator installed,” her assistant said. “But obviously we’re not going to be able to get in anything of massive size.”

Luckily, the place happens to be across the street from the 101-year-old carriage house that Mr. Lindemann, the son of a billionaire cell-phone magnate, bought in 2004 for $6.75 million. In 2006, he briefly put it back on the market for more than twice that amount, but Ms. Bennett said the family will live there when it’s fully renovated.

How does the family’s interior tastes run? According to a profile in 2005, Hirst, Warhol and Koons were sprinkled around the family’s living room; Takashi Murakami wallpaper lined his daughters’ bedroom; word art in the kitchen spelled “YOU ROTTEN PRICK.”

Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, the epically inventive engineer of Brazilian psychedelia, Tropicália, deserves to live in some volcano with poodle fur wallpaper, a milkshake bathtub, corn syrup carpets and his 60’s backup band Os Mutantes perpetually playing live.

But the 65-year-old musician and his fourth wife, mellifluously listed on the deed as Flora Nair Giordano Gil Moreira, bought a new 996-square-foot condo this month with white-painted maple floors and glass-and-lacquer kitchen cabinetry, plus an in-building health center.

The two-bedroom apartment, at the A Building on East 13th Street, cost $1.34 million, according to public records.

The couple reportedly has kept a home in Rio de Janeiro, the same city where, 40 years ago, Mr. Gil and his friend Caetano Veloso were arrested and put in solitary cells after offending Brazil’s military dictatorship. (Tropicália once had its own TV program—Divine, Marvelous—and Mr. Veloso had put a gun to his head while singing a song on their Christmas show.) The two lived in London, in exile, until 1972.

Mr. Gil, who has said he’ll step down this year as minister of culture because of a polyp on his vocal chords, will have an East Village rooftop pool, plus its sun deck and cabanas, for recuperation. And his apartment has terraces, a walk-through closet in the master bedroom suite and a 23-foot-long living and dining room with open kitchen. “I have made choices marked by minimalism and taken a certain care in not to bet on adventures,” he told the Associated Press last year.

On the downside, some of the 27 comments left on The Observer’s Web site after a recent Q&A with the A Building’s young developer, Ben Shaoul, didn’t have kind words for the condo. “We have so many suits in this building after only 2 months occupancy,” one of Mr. Gil’s neighbors wrote, “due to unlivable unit conditions from massive plumbing leaks, broken appliances, deplorable workmanship, including all our floors buckling, major substitutions of high end finishes, and major shortage of square footage.”

Laura Blankfein, the wife of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, paid $701,000 for Suite 807 ("suite" being the euphemism for a staff apartment) at 15 Central Park West, city records show.

The Observer's Max Abelson reported that the Blankfeins closed on a 16th-floor duplex condo in the building back in January when the extent of the subprime mortgage crisis' impact on Wall Street was finally becoming clear. The couple signed the contract for the yet-to-be built apartment two days before Mr. Blankfein was promoted to CEO at Goldman in May 2006, at the height of the Manhattan real estate market.

Since then, the national market has tanked and New York's is stagnant. But while other Wall Street banking firms are writing down their balance sheets as quickly as they once did year-end bonus checks, Goldman Sachs, with Mr. Blankfein at the helm, has remained largely unscathed.  read more »

If you pay very little rent for an apartment in the very coveted real estate holy land off Fifth Avenue in the East 70’s, you probably don’t want to hear that Steven Croman has bought your building.

Mr. Croman, who has been named to The Village Voice’s 10 Worst Landlords List, made headlines in 2002 when he began to empty a 23-unit apartment building he’d bought for $5.5 million to make a quadruplex for his family, plus a duplex for his sister-in-law.

Last month, three blocks up at 7 East 75th Street, Mr. Croman bought another townhouse, paying $14.5 million to a family that had owned the house for decades. (You may recognize its facade from The Nanny, the nasally 90’s upper-class sitcom.)

But maybe fear would be unwarranted. “We have no plans to make it into a single-family house,” Mr. Croman said when reached on his cell phone. (He wanted to know how The Observer got the number—the answer is, it’s printed on construction permits for the $5.5 million house.)

Later, a spokesperson said there aren’t even plans to raise rents for the existing tenants. They’re worried anyway: “Particularly the proverbial little old ladies who have rent-stabilized units,” said a renter. “They’re very concerned.” That source happens to own a gold-mining company, which makes him harder to sympathize with than the two or three rent-controlled tenants and seven or eight rent-stabilized neighbors that he said are in the building.

Mr. Croman has dealt with their kind before: For the $5.5 million house nearby, he invoked a law that allows owners to live in their own buildings, even if they have to evict some rent-stabilized tenants. According to The Voice, Mr. Croman is known for “badgering phone calls, endless lawsuits, and leaning on already hard-pressed tenants.”

The house was sold by personal injury lawyer Bernard Robins and his wife and four children, plus his brother and his three children. In 1955, their parents bought the place and moved in from Brooklyn. They had some good tenants back then: “Mike Nichols was there for a while,” Mr. Robins said. “John Cassavetes [pictured] and Gena Rowlands, they all had the penthouse.”

According to city records, fabulist James Frey has a fabulous new unit to add to his three-bedroom apartment at 505 Greenwich Street. This month, Mr. Frey and wife Maya closed on a $985,000 one-bedroom apartment, next door to the three-bedroom condo.

They bought that first place for $2.55 million in May 2005, half a year before his two best-selling addiction memoirs were exposed as massively fictitious. “I don’t think it is a novel; I still think it’s a memoir,” he said about A Million Little Pieces on Oprah, even after he’d been outed. (The TV guru, who had helped the book sell millions of copies when she added it to her book club, got teary and quite upset.)

This time around, the one-bedroom condo was never on the market: Mr. Frey scooped it up directly from his neighbor, a contractor. “I guess it was just in the hallway: ‘Hey if you ever want to sell, let me know,’” the neighbor told The Observer. “He’d been wanting to do it for a while—he kept mentioning it to me.”

In exchange for his persistence, Mr. Frey now has an extra 722 square feet to add to his 2,039. According to old listings, his new unit has a cook’s kitchen, a luxury marble master bathroom, and floor-to-ceiling windows, which will probably go well with the open kitchen and “lavish master suite” in his first apartment—which was apparently “designed to maximize its luxury, privacy, and grandeur.”

Despite the brutal fallout from his fake memoirs (being forced by Oprah to acknowledge that you spent a few hours in jail instead of 87 days, for example, has to hurt an author’s ego), Mr. Frey received a reported $2 million from HarperCollins for his upcoming novel, Bright Shiny Morning. The book’s publisher told The Observer last year that the reported number is wrong, but wouldn’t say whether it’s low or high.

Why does Mr. Frey like the building so much? There’s a Zen-meditation garden, for one thing, plus a health club, a pet spa and a 24-hour doorman, valuable for keeping away the passionate 1,729 readers that joined a lawsuit complaining about the would-be memoirist’s fraud. They were awarded $27,348 last year.

The library alone at Brooke Astor’s 778 Park Avenue duplex, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases that got no less than 10 coats of scarlet lacquer, launched a thousand high-heeled Upper East Side adjectives. The philanthropist’s apartment was, until late July 2006, one of those co-ops that had long been fawned over as a perfect American home.

But that month, when Astor was 104 years old, her grandson Philip stated in court papers that the duplex had become a kind of dilapidated prison: He claimed his 82-year-old father, Anthony D. Marshall, was pilfering Astor’s fortune while she wallowed there. “Her bedroom is so cold in the winter that my grandmother is forced to sleep in the TV room in torn nightgowns,” the papers said, “on a filthy couch that smells, probably from dog urine.” (A judge later found claims of elder abuse to be unsubstantiated.)

Astor died last August. By November, Mr. Marshall faced a 16-count indictment based on larceny; he pleaded not guilty.

And this month, agents from five of the city’s top brokerages met in the 778 Park duplex’s famous library to audition for the listing. The apartment could go on the market for $46 million, if not more, which would be one of the largest listings ever in New York. Even with the scandal, it will be one of the most important properties to hit the market this year.

Still, those broker auditions must have been odd: On the one hand, there were bankers from JPMorgan Chase, the firm that became Astor’s court-appointed guardians in 2006, after Mr. Marshall agreed to give up control of his mother’s affairs.

And then there was Mr. Marshall himself, the heir to the apartment, and his wife, Charlene. Reached at their apartment nearby, Ms. Marshall told The Observer that the broker interviews were not their idea. “We did not initiate that,” she said, “the bank initiated that.”

The couple has even considered moving into the Astor duplex. “Sure, we’re thinking about it,” she said. “Her apartment has that wonderful terrace and little library! I wish life were more simple, but it isn’t.”

On the plus side, she said her mother-in-law had bequeathed the apartment to her husband in every will since 1963, so there’s no question of who the place belongs to, or who decides its fate. “He’s still the heir,” one of the interviewed brokers told The Observer. “It took me a while to wrap my mind around that, but it is the case.”

With all this history, it’s not surprising that the top brokers didn’t go in alone: Brown Harris Stevens’ Mary Rutherfurd came with her firm’s formidable president, Hall Wilkie; Stribling’s Kirk Henckels went in with colleague Margaret Furniss, who knows the Marshall family from church; Sotheby’s Roberta Golubock came with her president and CEO, Kathryn Korte; Elliman’s Rebecca Steindecker and Catherine Durgin were there, too, probably because their firm manages the building; and Leighton Candler represented Corcoran, though it isn’t clear if she was alone.

When asked who was her favorite broker, Ms. Marshall said: “Tony and I have had so little time since we were there to even discuss it, because there are so many other things on the table.”

None of the brokers would comment for this article. But one said the duplex is configured now as a three-bedroom, with a massive master suite, but that there could be as many as five bedrooms, with space for staff left over. “If that’s living shabby,” the broker said, when asked about the grandson’s court complaints, “then let me live shabby.”

Still, a buyer would almost certainly redo the place, considering that it hasn’t been renovated in years. That’ll upset the godly interior decorator Albert Hadley, who likes reciting the tale of how his design for Astor’s most famous room came about: “I said,” he told The Observer this week, “‘If I were you, I’d get rid of this room and create a proper library.’ And she said, ‘But, Albert, what do you mean?’ And I said, this is fast thinking, ‘I think it should be perhaps a bit more up to date but classical and in character.’ She said, ‘What color?’ I said, ‘I don’t know—probably a wonderful dark red, maybe lacquer, and maybe with brass?’ I didn’t know what I was talking about. I just said it. But she liked it.”

Sometimes even good New Yorkers get wrapped up in very bad things. And then, if they’re lucky, they buy $10 million Soho penthouses to recuperate and repent in while the tabloids move on.

Last August, the 40-something father of two Edward Scheetz found his 23-year-old girlfriend stiff and “different funny colors” in his Las Vegas apartment. Mr. Scheetz, the CEO of Ian Schrager’s old Morgans Hotel Group, was not accused of wrongdoing in the death of the woman, a high-school dropout who had worked in a tanning salon: Her body held large quantities of cocaine and oxycodone.

Mr. Scheetz stepped down as CEO in September, and now just six months later he has a new apartment to boost his spirits. According to city records, he paid $10 million for a penthouse at 20 Greene Street.

Old listings show that the place has a total of 6,189 square feet of indoor and outdoor space, beamed 13-foot ceilings, a wine cooler, a steam room and a Jacuzzi tub. There’s also space for a large Jacuzzi tub on the roof terrace.

But how do his decorating tastes run? Last year Mr. Scheetz had Philippe Starck’s famous lobby at the Royalton gutted and replaced with leathery, metallic noir décor, including a two-sided gas fireplace.

So, of course, there’s black granite in the master bathroom of his old place, a 5,262-square-foot apartment at 76 Crosby Street, which he bought from Kelly Ripa in late 2006 for $6.7 million. It’s now on the market with Sotheby’s International Realty, asking $9.4 million. The listing says it includes “his/her separate customized walk-in wardrobes,” plus, oddly, an “oversized walk-in shower with rain forest and large soaking tub.”

When asked about his client, listing broker Keith Copley said, “He’s a great guy, he’s a wonderful person, very nice guy.”

Besides Ms. Ripa, who now has the 76 Crosby duplex penthouse, Mr. Scheetz is leaving old neighbors like Nick Denton, the Gawker Media mogul. In a November Gawker post (not written by Mr. Denton), the gossip blog teased Mr. Scheetz for his Vegas troubles, reprinting one of the 23-year-old’s text messages: “I cant belive [sic] how much coke he does all the time all day long.”

The Real Deal’s Web site broke the news of the purchase.

Even if schadenfreude is universal, few human beings take joy in others’ suffering quite like high-end brokers, the kind with silk scarves, Harvard degrees and chauffeurs. They especially love when other agents can’t sell big listings, especially if something tangy got in the way.

So brokers have been merrily whispering about the odd fate of the penthouse triplex at 895 Park Avenue, listed late last year for $29.5 million with Alexa Lambert, a top broker at Stribling. Amazingly, it took only 28 days to go to contract, as reported by The Observer in November.

But something went wrong: The board-approved buyers, a hedge-fund man and his wife, are getting divorced. The rumor was that the husband preferred to drop the 10 percent deposit—which, if the apartment contract was for full asking price, would be a heartbreaking $2.95 million—supposedly because divorce laws here assure “equitable distribution” between spouses. So if he went through with buying the $29.5 million apartment, the story went, he’d probably have to split it with his ex-wife. So now the listing is back on the market.

But a source with knowledge of the deal said that that version of the story isn’t entirely true. As it happens, the couple did indeed opt to give up their massive deposit—which, even if discounted, is more than the price of two average Manhattan apartments. But the source said the husband wanted to finish the deal, and it was actually the wife that wanted to back out: “He understood it was bad form to give your word and not follow through, so he would have closed and flipped.”

And as for those equitable distribution laws, divorce attorney John Zulack pointed out to The Observer that the apartment would have been bought with shared money that would likely be divided evenly anyway. (So backing out probably wouldn’t save the hedge-fund husband anything.) But here’s this: If the wife needlessly forced the forfeit of a multimillion-dollar deposit, Mr. Zulack said, that could be considered “dissipation of marital assets” and count against her in the divorce settlement.

The seller, ex-model Bonnie Pfeifer Evans, left, probably isn’t thrilled. She’s the widow of Charles “Mr. Lucky” Evans, who produced Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie (his brother was Bob Evans). Ms. Evans was reportedly left with nothing in her husband’s will, but she’s said to have a broker’s license—and, oddly, wants to get a commission from the triplex sale by representing the buyers.

Luxury watch executive Benny Shabtai’s extravagantly contemporary townhouse at 870 Park Avenue, once described by the historian Christopher Gray as a futuristic beach house, first went on the market way back in February 2004, listed for $23 million by Corcoran’s super-aggressive superbroker Carrie Chiang.

That August the price dropped to $21 million, then to $19.9 million in June 2005. The place still hadn’t sold by January 2006, when it was taken off the market.

Never mind that the six-bedroom house didn’t sell for $19.9 million, or that Mr. Shabtai paid just $8.2 million in July 2000 (his seller was Judith Stern Peck, who kept the house after she divorced billionaire Leonard Stern): Last week, he listed the house again, this time for $33 million, the Web site for brokerage Brown Harris Stevens shows.

And somehow the new price isn’t far-fetched. Listing broker Paula Del Nunzio, who has already sold two of the city’s three most expensive townhouses, said the place is worth more now because its designer, Robert A. M. Stern, has been deified for his work on the new 15 Central Park West condo.

“It sold out for $2 billion,” she said, “so anything you do that’s so famous and so well received makes everything you did wonderful.” Ms. Del Nunzio’s listing puts Mr. Stern’s name in its subtitle, but doesn’t mention that he modernized the house in 1976, and that it suffered a fire in 1992. The interior was rebuilt then by Donald Trump’s favored architect, Costas Kondylis.

But another change in their favor, Ms. Del Nunzio said, is that there are more plush private art collections that need huge well-lit walls. “I mean,” she said, “look at how big those walls are.” (Marketing photos show what looks like a Mona Lisa in the living room—this is the kind of house that has hosted, literally, Ariel Sharon and Michael Jackson at the same party.)

On the downside, townhouse buyers like to be on leafy streets instead of Park Avenue, a co-op drag. Plus, Mr. Stern’s postmodern touches, like a glass-brick south wall, won’t be to everyone’s tastes.

When asked about the different listing prices, Ms. Chiang said, “I don’t know, you should go and ask Paula.” Then Ms. Chiang said that a few months ago she was consulted by her friend Lori, Mr. Shabtai’s wife, but didn’t want to have the listing if it was over $30 million, which she thought would be unfeasible. But Ms. Chiang said in a second phone call: “She’s a friend of mine. I would be very happy if she gets it.”

There are all kinds of cheap vacant lots. (There’s even a good song about them—it goes, “He’s so drunk he’s passed out in a Datsun/ that’s parked out in the hot sun/ in the saddest vacant lot in all the world.”) But the real estate market is so glittery in Manhattan now that nothing, even a large piece of nothingness, is ever inexpensive here.

Consider the 80-foot-long vacant lot called 22-28 Downing Street, near Bedford and West Houston. In July 2004, it sold for $2,625,000 from its longtime owner to a real estate developer, and then three years later it sold to a developer named Gary Sherman for $10.54 million.

Nothing has changed, but late last week Mr. Sherman put that same vacant lot on the market, split into three sections, for a total of $20.25 million (or about $6.75 million each). And for $45.4 million he’ll sell you the lot with three fully built houses. The future townhouses, each five floors and around 6,250 square feet, have been listed individually for about $15 million.

Records show that he and the last owner both applied for new building permits, but didn’t get consent from the city. On an application in September, Mr. Sherman’s designer is listed as David Piscuskas of 1100 Architect, a firm with clients like Harrison Ford, Jasper Johns and mammoth financier Dan Loeb.

“They’re not 100 percent approved,” Elliman listing broker Leonard Steinberg said about the townhouse plans. “They’ve not been turned down either—there are just a few modifications to make.”

Three separate buyers will probably buy the lot’s three future townhouses, though on the other hand there has already been an inquiry from a family about buying one townhouse for the parents and two for the two adult children. What about the large price tags? “I know it’s not a bargain,” the broker said, “but it’s actually not badly priced.” That’s hard to argue with, considering that most $15 million townhouses in the neighborhood still need pricey work.

And a more modest buyer could just take one of the cheapest lots—23 feet wide and $6.5 million—and build something less expensive than what Mr. Sherman has planned. “And here comes the other miracle,” said Mr. Steinberg. “You don’t have an existing structure, so you aren’t as religiously bound by landmark rules”—which limit what can and can’t be renovated.

Asked about the potential for something unsightly getting built on the quiet street, Mr. Steinberg said no one wants something on Downing that “belongs on another planet. People are coming here to get something that’s Village-oriented.” Then why wouldn’t someone just buy an existing brownstone? “I think some people love classic old cars,” he