Manhattan Transfers

Envying the over-wealthy is a terrible thing. Despite the pleasure of writing a Manhattan real estate column, every time I report on another $25 million real estate deal, or a type of marble in a master bathroom that I can’t really pronounce, or an en suite dressing room that is literally bigger than the entire sixth-floor walk-up apartment that I share with a roommate, something inside of me dies.

So Morgan Hertzan, an ex-MTV executive who launched LX.TV, an online television luxury lifestyle brand that makes short, fawning videos about the well-to-do city lifestyle—especially the real estate part—must have innards of steel to resist the dejection and existential malaise you’d think anyone who produces videos on $16.  read more »

If you’ve co-founded the biggest preteen music phenomenon since the Backstreet Boys, and you also happen to have a record label that’s made cheesy but enormously well-selling compilations (Monster Ballads, Goin’ South), it’s all right if you spend nearly $8 million on a three-unit apartment and then, before spending a night there, decide you don’t quite want it anymore.

Cliff Chenfeld, the 48-year-old lawyer and music entrepreneur who helped launch the tectonically successful Kidz Bop concert tour and CD series (as of last year, the first 12 volumes had sold over 10 million copies, and two more have since been released), paid $7,965,000 for a 14-room, 5,200-square-foot loft at 219 West 81st Street last month.  read more »

Late last decade, Peter Norton, the Buddhist monk turned software pioneer turned art magnate, was modest and enlightened enough to choose a Manhattan apartment so unassuming that his architect, Maya Lin, complained it was too small and dark. After all, the place was a ground-floor duplex, partially below ground.

Mr. Norton’s tastes have apparently changed. According to a deed filed with the city’s Department of Finance just this week, he paid $6.8 million for a penthouse at the Greenwich, a huge prewar luxury loft building on West 13th Street, late last year. The condo has at least 23 windows facing north and west, according to the Corcoran listing, but then there’s a 10.  read more »

In a weird reversal of the rule that horrifyingly omnipotent Russian oligarchs are supposed to be buying up New York’s trophy condos, the automobile and oil billionaire Boris Berezovsky has sold his 30th-floor apartment at Trump International on Central Park West.

Late last month, according to city records, a buyer named Lucietta Estates Corp.—its president is listed as Joseph DiLorenzo—paid $7,550,000 for the apartment.

Mr. Berezovsky bought the condo for $3.2 million in 2001, the same year he fled Russia, where he has since been found guilty in absentia of embezzlement. He and Putin have clashed furiously, though under Yeltsin Mr.  read more »

Ten years ago, the architect Maya Lin redesigned an apartment for the 1980s software magnate Peter Norton that was so modest--half underground, and not that big--that Architectural Digest called it "quirky, if not awkward." When a Brazilian banker bought the place and redid it, an Interior Design piece on his renovations was called "Let There Be Light."

Mr. Norton's new Manhattan apartment is bigger and brighter, a better fit for the man whose cocky pose on the cover of his eponymous computer programming guides and fix-it software products became an icon of '80s computing. According to city records filed yesterday, he paid $6.  read more »

It's been well over a month since I received one of the most riveting letters in the history of letter writing. It's an e-mail from a man who says he's the eldest cousin of Alistair Economakis--the landlord that's awfully close to turning the 15-unit, 60-room tenement building he owns at 47 East Third Street into a mansion for his family.

Despite several e-mails sent from The Observer to the landlord's lawyer (as well as to that lawyer's spokesperson) asking to confirm that Mr. Economakis has a cousin named Evel, we still haven't heard anything one way or the other. So take the letter with a grain of salt.  read more »

On Monday, the day Mayor Bloomberg warned that New York City’s budget deficit will go from $68 million in 2009 to more than $5 billion in 2011, thanks to drooping tax revenue from Wall Street and real estate sales, three of the city’s most expensive rental apartments hit the market.

The timing of the gargantuan new rentals, all asking $75,000 per month (nearly $1 million per year), is enough to make one wonder if there are more absurdly expensive apartments in New York than absurdly wealthy New Yorkers who want them. That would be a tectonic shift from the past half-decade, when high-end brokers constantly kvetched about all the demand and such little supply.  read more »

About six months after Steven Feder, the psychic hot-line guru behind that pay-per-call legend Miss Cleo, bought a $24.5 million condo at the Time Warner Center, Cheryl Mercuris, who founded the telemarketing firm Quality Resources Inc., based in a 20,000-square-foot call center in Clearwater, Fla., paid $8.3 million for a duplex in the glassy Columbus Circle development.

She’ll combine the duplex with a 1,987-square-foot apartment she bought for $2,750,000 from a Salt Lake City attorney in 2004, according to city records.

“I love the building,” said Ms. Mercuris, who returned a call at night after getting off a flight from the Hamptons.  read more »

Years of appreciating the Grateful Dead’s music leaves one with the impression that the band’s surviving members all maintain a certain kind of house. Surely, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir lives in a moss-covered mansion where little pixie servants tend to his benevolent whims, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann resides below the oceanic photic zone with kindly umbrella mouth gulper eels, or, at the very least, bassist Phil Lesh makes his home with dancing bears in a rainbow-colored cave.  read more »

But that isn’t the case. According to city records, Mr. Lesh and his wife, Jillspeth, paid $1,775,000 earlier this month for a condo on Prince Street

The co-op 740 Park, which is so obsessed over that a death in the building automatically becomes a hot topic among Upper East Side brokers (who want the listing), finally has a new apartment on the market.

Corcoran's Web site just put up a $38 million listing for a 16-room, five-bedroom, seven-and-a-half-bathroom duplex. Apparently there are another three bedrooms and two bathrooms in the servants quarters off a "seperate [sic] staircase," according to the listing.  read more »

Oddly, the apartment is being handled by a Corcoran broker named Julie Gordon, who's a mere salesperson with the firm--lowlier than the Rolls Royce-driving

Even though the most expensive single residential deal ever documented in New York City is still a $53 million townhouse sale (though that’s unofficially been beaten by combined-unit spreads at the Plaza), and even though Manhattan real estate is slouching toward dreariness, the biggest real estate story of the summer has been potential $100 million sales at 15 Central Park West, where buyers who closed on their new condos just this year are putting the places back on the market at massive markups.

But most brokers, even the ones who are listing the biggest units in the just-finished mega-condo, say nine-digit apartments are a fantasy.  read more »

Last April, Fred Wilson, probably the best-known tech venture capitalist in New York City (his firm invests in beautiful new-wave Web sites like Tumblr and Twitter), and his wife, Joanne, sold a double-wide West 10th Street townhouse for $33,148,800, the biggest single residential deal ever in downtown.

To replace it, they’re building a Hudson River wonderland.

But when they spent $16 million on the massive site at 397 West 12th Street last April, partnering with the architect and developer Cary Tamarkin, Mr. Tamarkin had already been working on it for years: After he agreed to buy the property and another seven blocks up, the seller tried to make a separate deal with someone else for more money.  read more »

Eugene McQuade is a smart man. Last year, the president and chief operating officer of Freddie Mac declined an offer to replace Richard Syron as chief executive of the mortgage behemoth.

Instead, he became vice chairman and president of Merrill Lynch’s U.S. banks, just before his old company, which, along with Fannie Mae, guarantees or owns around half of the nation’s $12 trillion of mortgage debt, plummeted so theatrically (the stock went from $67.20 to $3.89 in 52 weeks) that the entire American economy has apparently been jeopardized.

It’s unlikely that any of the $12 trillion in mortgage debt comes from Mr.  read more »

Twelve months and 26 days ago, according to city records, the nonprofit adoption agency Spence-Chapin sold its 24,463-square-foot headquarters at 4-8 East 94th Street, built from three 19th-century row houses, to Richard Mack, a managing partner of his father’s multibillion real estate investment group, Apollo Real Estate Advisors. He paid $23 million.

But real estate executives are wilier than nonprofit adoption agencies. After receiving a permit from the Landmarks Preservation Commission in December to essentially replace an un-pretty three-story addition, built above a third of the house, with a full 60-foot penthouse, among other upgrades, Mr. Mack put the property back on the market this week.  read more »

In what must surely be the most sweepingly devastating tragedy of the week (in terms of Park Avenue real estate), the late Brooke Astor's salivated-over $46 million duplex at 778 Park Avenue has been taken off the market for the summer.

The listing is down from the Web site of Leighton Candler, the Corcoran broker who won the listing after five of the city’s top brokerages met in the co-op's library, where the floor-to-ceiling bookcases have 10 coats of scarlet lacquer.

"We’re doing just a few things to the apartment during the summer work period," said Mr. Candler. "We’re making a few minor alterations to the apartment--we’re raising a ceiling that had been lowered in the entrance hall, because, you know, it needed to be done.  read more »

Peter Jackson, that jumble-haired, once obese New Zealander, whose massively fantastic Lord of the Rings trilogy makes the Star Wars franchise look like a feeble little video project by comparison, is not a name that simply pops up on a real estate deed in city records. (A Queens man named Peter A. Jackson and Peter G. Jackson of Brooklyn both make purchases in their own names, though that’s different.)

So considering that the filmmaker’s executive assistant Matthew Dravitzki, his New Zealand-based attorney Michael Stephens and his Hollywood power lawyer Peter Nelson are all listed in city records on twin penthouse purchases in Tribeca, it seems likely that Mr.  read more »

Eleven years after the Dada-faced Jocelyn Wildenstein, who looks like a William Steig drawing of that great plastic surgery scene in Brazil, found her husband, Alec, in bed with a 19-year-old blonde at their 29-foot-wide mansion—Mr. Wildenstein, in a towel, responded by pulling a 9mm pistol on his wife—the famous townhouse has been sold.

The deal, first reported on The Observer’s Web site on Monday, closed earlier this month for $42.5 million.

In 1999, Ms. Wildenstein left the mansion at 11 East 64th Street, which was owned by her father-in-law, Daniel, and which she and her husband had shared with Alec’s younger brother Guy.  read more »

It took 18 months for Abraham Pustilnik to renovate his three-bedroom, Canadian-maple-floored apartment in the Century, that twin-towered 1930s Art Deco condominium on Central Park West, which is exactly how long a two-borough undercover investigation dubbed “Operation Old School” lasted before Mr. Pustilnik, his mother, his wife and 12 others were indicted for insurance fraud and grand larceny.

He and his mom, who led an enterprise of illegal New York health clinics and a billing company that filed a decade’s worth of bogus claims with over 60 insurance companies, had to pay $4 million after pleading guilty to corruption charges. But they’ll be all right: That Central Park West apartment has sold for $5.  read more »