Actresses don’t tend to have a particularly easy time getting into Upper East Side co-ops. At River House, the building so wonderfully correct that real estate brokers cannot use its name in marketing materials, Diane Keaton was turned down back when she was a bachelorette linked to Woody Allen, and Joan Crawford was rejected, too (though apparently because Coca-Cola’s president was in the building, and Ms. Crawford was on Pepsi’s board).

But Renée Zellweger has outsmarted the neighborhood.

According to city records, the 39-year-old actress has gradually amassed an $8.2 million spread in a small, unassuming co-op at 82nd Street and Madison Avenue.  read more »

Westchester corrugated-cardboard magnate Dennis Mehiel tasted the sorrowful, sour lows of Manhattan high-end real estate in September 2002, back when he was the running mate to H. Carl McCall, the Democratic nominee for New York governor.

“What does it take to get the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor?” asked a front-page article in the right-leaning Sun. “Something less, it appears, than the qualifications for buying an apartment in the Dakota.”

Mr. Mehiel had been rejected by the beloved Central Park West co-op’s board, which, as far as bad news goes, wasn’t as salacious as some of the political leaks that year, but is still enough to make a multimillionaire blush.  read more »

It’s hard to grasp what mortgage-backed securities are, or why they’re wreaking gruesome havoc on the global economy. (Actually, an excellent little article by a Slate editorial assistant named Chris Wilson explains that companies like Bear Stearns buy up bouquets of mortgages from primary lenders, then use monthly payments from homeowners as a nice little revenue stream—a plan that backfires when the housing market wobbles or interest rates climb.)

But back in the rosier days of March 2005, when Anilesh Ahuja had recently become the head of the multibillion-dollar mortgage-backed securities group at Deutsche Bank, he and his wife spent $7.  read more »

Most 1,203-word Sunday Times articles about combined-unit condos with nine surround-sound speakers and 14 plasma televisions and a 15-foot retractable theater screen and 35 electrically shaded windows stir up throbbing, bilious resentment.

But there was something unpredictably lovely about a July 2005 profile of the apartment that architect David Mandl built for himself and his wife, Anita, at 280 Park Avenue South. The article ends with Ms. Mandl explaining that they watch a little TV, but prefer putting photographs from their three decades together up on those 15 screens.

A few months after that article was published, Mr. Mandl, who co-founded the much-lauded firm Meltzer/Mandl Architects, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  read more »

It isn’t a wild surprise that Karen Hess, who died last year at age 88 after a lifetime of crotchety but widely admired culinary writing (“How shall we tell our fellow Americans that our palates have been ravaged,” one of her book’s introductions went, “that our food is awful, and that our most respected authorities on cookery are poseurs?”) left behind an amazing and odd kitchen at 285 Riverside Drive.

“She got, I think it was, a Garland--a huge restaurant stove--and no one could figure out how they got it in there, she couldn’t even remember,” her daughter, Martha, told The Observer.  read more »

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 »