Manhattan Transfers

The over-chic luxury loft building at 285 Lafayette Street—where 31 apartment units were built above a former chocolate factory, then sold to David Bowie and Iman, Patrick McEnroe, an IBM heiress, a Murdoch heir—is supposed to be a shiny, happy place.

Larry and Annette Everston, the owners of the high-end shoe shop Otto Tootsi Plohound, outdid their neighbors in shininess: The Observer reported in 2000 that while Mr. McEnroe hadn’t planned renovations for his place, the Everston couple had spent close to $3 million to transform their $3.5 million sixth-floor loft “into a northern Morocco village, complete with mosaic tiles, a citrus garden of lemon and orange trees in the sunroom, Venetian plaster walls, cement countertops built to look 200 years old, even a waterfall in one corner.  read more »

If the economy plunges further, if the recession becomes a depression, if there’s blood on the streets and panic in the air, short sellers, the investors who make money by betting that stocks will fall, will be seen as an evil coterie of cackling villains that profited from downturns they may have encouraged.

More than John Paulson (who made $3.7 billion last year by betting against subprime mortgages) or David Einhorn (who may be helping Lehman Brothers go the way of Bear Stearns), James S. Chanos, the president and founder of a hedge-fund group called Kynikos (from “cynic” in Greek), may be the best short seller of them all.  read more »

Last month, The Observer wrote about 30 West 21st Street, the building famous for its old new-wave dance club Danceteria (Madonna debuted there). The place sold last year for $25 million to an investor who's turning the place into 11 4,000-square-foot apartments (listed around $5.8 to $7.9 million each), plus a triplex penthouse ($7.7 million), plus a townhouse apartment ($9.25 million).

“Legitimacy is the one word I can really give to it,” the investor, named Kevin Comer, said then, but by legitimacy he meant details like three-inch solid marble kitchen countertops, lifestyle designers, in-loft wine cellars and gyms, radiant-heat floors and daily maid service with chocolates on pillows.  read more »

The colossal Manhattan real estate story of Edgar Bronfman Jr., Seagram liquor grandson and Warner Music Group CEO, has finally taken a comparatively imperfect turn. Eight months after he sold his East 64th Street townhouse to a Russian oil billionaire for $50 million, even though he paid $4,375,000 for the property in 1994, his 11-room apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue has gone to contract for somewhere between $20 and $21 million, a source said, well below the original $24 million asking price.

Meanwhile, the duplex penthouse he bought at the Carhart Mansion on East 95th Street last October for around $19 million, and put on the market in April for $24.  read more »

The 13,137-square-foot limestone mansion at 9 East 67th Street will never again have dramatics as grand as that episode a few years ago, when a convicted sex offender living in California quibbled with his siblings over the family property. After a judge stepped in, the comely, slightly-mysterious, Russian real estate investor Janna Bullock (pictured) finally bought the house in April 2005 for $10 million.

By that November, it was on again for $29 million.

High-end Upper East Side brokers, the kind with pristine Palm Beach tans and Aspen ski-slope condos, can’t match the bickering of felonious heirs, but they have their own kind of drama.  read more »

Regina Spektor, the massively charming, epically quirky, Russia-born, Bronx-raised, East Village-bred singer-songwriter, who has two particular Joni Mitchell-caliber songs, “Carbon Monoxide” and “Somedays,” that can make this reporter cry, just bought an exceptionally nonquirky apartment in a huge white-brick postwar building at East 34th Street and Third Avenue.

According to city records she paid $1,125,000.

Speaking from his 50-foot boat, listing broker Donald Kohlreiter, who also has an apartment in the building, said: “She’s just exuberant. She just loves the apartment, she loves the views”—you can see the Chrysler Building from the condo, plus the East River—“and she likes the building.  read more »

Significant sociologists, even the ones famous for studies on the inequalities between siblings, sometimes have complicated relationships with their little sisters.

New York University sociology chair Dalton Conley (pictured) sold his sister Alexandra, the former executive director of the Soho Repertory Theater, a two-unit apartment at 323 West 11th Street for $1.44 million this month, according to city records. “I definitely have a lot more money than she does, and that’s why she gets the hand-me-downs,” Mr. Conley said. “I’m older, I’m in a more established industry; she was working for a small black-box theater.”

What about childhood? “I was more of the good kid.  read more »

It’s hard to call something ironic in this town: There’s always an English grad student nearby to point out that Alanis Morissette’s understanding of the word is simply erroneous; even Wikipedia’s 3,339-word (not counting bibliography) entry for irony has a “usage controversy” section to expound on potential linguistic misinterpretations.

But consider this: Paul Risoli, the former Bank of America broker caught in a massive Wall Street insider trading ring, and sentenced to seven months in prison this February for taking $12,500 in bribes, just sold his apartment to New York University’s School of Law.  read more »

Too many unsold apartments, especially massive apartments with servants’ halls and bedrooms with fireplaces, are a terrible thing for a famously pricey, scarily selective building like River House, probably the best co-op building off Fifth and Park avenues. The supply of River House spreads is supposed to be chicly low; demand is supposed to be desperately high.

Nevertheless, an A-line apartment on a low floor just went on the market for $29 million, and it has a bit of company.

According to city records, the seller is Laura Pels, who “remade herself from the quietly supportive wife of a very rich man”—she divorced broadcasting businessman Donald Pels in 1992, after he made about $200 million in a takeover—“into a major, albeit press-shy, benefactress of American theater,” a short New Yorker profile said in 1995.

On the bright side, Ms. Pels’ 13-room place has a library and 30-foot-long living room with a wood-burning fireplace; a 15.5-foot-long servants’ hall and a double maid’s room; two 11-foot-long balconies overlooking the East River off the dining room and master bedroom; and then a 45.5-foot-long terrace facing south.

On the downside, it’s now the building’s third listing for well over $20 million, not including a $39 million duplex that is still available, but apparently not officially on the market. City records suggest nothing in the building has sold recently for more than $10 million.

Ms. Pels didn’t respond to messages left at her home and office asking for her thoughts on the apartment. But she doesn’t seem like the overly optimistic type: “When she is complimented on her apartment’s East River view,” that New Yorker profile says, “she recalls a shock she had a few years ago when she looked out a window and saw a corpse floating by.”

mabelson@observer.com

If the 25-room, stupendously wide red-brick mansion at 603 Park Avenue stays on the market past December, which, considering its melodramatic history, is in the realm of possibility, it will be 20 years since the office-tower developer Sherman Cohen bought the neo-Federal corner townhouse.

And he’s never moved in, or spent a night.

The story goes that Mr. Cohen bought the 100-foot-wide, 20-foot-deep mansion as a surprise for his wife, Gloria, spending a then-gargantuan sum of $12.5 million. But she was unhappy: “I think my mother’s reluctance was that she really likes a doorman building and she likes the services a co-op provides, and my father was respectful of that,” son Charles, president and CEO of the family firm, said from Florida.

Within months, the townhouse, so elongated it technically has four addresses, was on the market again, for $20 million. According to reports and notes kept by a local brokerage, the Cohens’ on-and-off asking price went from $13.5 million in 1995 to $14 million in 1999; $14.5 million and $14 million again in 2000; $25 million in 2002; back down to $14 million four months later; up to $25 million by 2004; up to $30 million in 2005; down to $29.5 million in 2006; and back up to $35 million (with mega-broker Dolly Lenz) in 2007.

Last month, the $35 million listing went to Serena Boardman and Leila Stone at Sotheby’s.

The younger Mr. Cohen blamed those apparent price changes on “scuttlebutt.” But he confirmed that the family has turned down big offers, including what he called a bid over $30 million: “I think there are a lot of people that see the house and feel that, with smoke and mirrors, they can put a deal together, that’s why we haven’t seriously entertained any offers.”

The house cost $65,000 when it was built for a sugar wholesaler in 1920; he had to sell three years later to a coal magnate, who sold to cancer researcher James Murphy, who hired young Philip Johnson to do work on it around 1932 (“when,” according to the architect, “I really hadn’t done anything yet”). The doctor’s widow lived in the house until 1987.

By 2003, the younger Mr. Cohen said he had considered buying up four or five neighboring houses to build a tower, but was told by “some astute zoning people” that the Landmarks Preservation Commission wouldn’t be thrilled about his plans. Instead, the family did a sweeping renovation on the house.

Now, according to the floor plan, there is a gym, an office, a library, a study, three staff rooms, a huge butler’s pantry, a huge breakfast room off the huge kitchen, and a basement theater, too. And yet there are only two official bedrooms because the master suite has massive his-and-her bathrooms, each with its own staircase leading to duplexed dressing rooms.

The new brokers wouldn’t comment, but Michele Kleier, who had the listing earlier this year, said about the Cohens: “You know what? They’re tough; they’re smart. People always say that people like that are hard to get along with, but they know what they want.”

mabelson@observer.com

Like the 1998 BusinessWeek cover story that christened her “THE PROPHET OF WALL STREET,” profiles of Goldman Sachs’ famously bullish senior strategist Abby Joseph Cohen merrily point out that she’s spent her whole life in the same middle-class Queens neighborhood.

But last month she finally arrived in Manhattan, buying a co-op from a billionaire’s son: Ms. Cohen and her husband, David, the NYPD’s labor counsel, spent $7.5 million for an eight-room apartment at the Majestic on Central Park West, according to city records.

Only in Wes Anderson films do analysts who can alter global markets live on New York blocks called something like 212th Street, which is near where Ms. Cohen bought her Queens house in 1983, according to city records. The new Manhattan apartment, with its $4,514.94 monthly maintenance and its wood-burning fireplace, walnut floors, wraparound master bedroom windows, park-facing library, serious dining room and oversize maid’s room, makes sense for a woman who was billed above Henry Kissinger (but below Bernard-Henri Levy) in an Israeli discussion panel last month on “Facing Tomorrow.”

The Majestic apartment was sold by Michelle Grabanski and Bill Pohlad, the mild-mannered son of a Minnesota billionaire and a producer of Brokeback Mountain, A Prairie Home Companion and Terrence Malick’s mystical new Sean Penn-Brad Pitt film, Tree of Life.

“Everything changed when this Medici came into my life,” Mr. Penn has said of the non-stingy Mr. Pohlad. “He’s the first producer I’ve ever worked with where I am the one to bring up the money issues.”

Mr. Pohlad apparently doesn’t fuss over real estate penny-pinching either. He and his wife spent $8.2 million on the apartment in June 2006, which means they probably should have gotten twice as much in this sale. Instead he lost $700,000, not getting close to the $7,995,000 he was asking as of last September, let alone the apartment’s original $8,795,000 ticket price from last June.

Luckily, his father, Carl, owns the Minnesota Twins and happens to be the richest owner in Major League Baseball, which means the co-op sale won’t hurt the producer or his Brad Pitt film. Reached at her office, listing broker Pamela D’Arc wouldn’t comment on the sale or that $700,000 loss, other than to say: “I cannot speak to that, I really can’t. But, you know, there are certainly market conditions.”

But family money probably explains the sale better than any market details. “I mean, obviously,” the broker said, “there are different situations that surround each sale.”

mabelson@observer.com

A duplex apartment that stretches across two Tribeca buildings, 39 and 41 North Moore Street, just hit the market for $17.9 million. The listing broker, Helen Dreyfuss, says there's about 3,973 square feet of interior space (that's 11 rooms, four bedrooms, two wood-burning fireplaces, an office, a media room, and windowed double kitchen), plus 2,321 square feet of epic terraces ("seamless integration from predinner cocktails to dinner to after-dinner drinks and cigars in a finely articulated sequence of individual spaces.")

The sellers are Joy and Leonard Toboroff, the 74-year-old vice chairman of a Houston-based oil/gas-drilling outfit named Allis-Chalmers Energy. They got the place a few years ago from Tom Freston, the felled MTV and Viacom chief.

Reached through his broker, Mr. Toboroff had this to say when asked why he'd put the place on the market: "We have two kids that are out on their own now--my daughter got married last summer; we’re out of the country about 100 days of the year anyway." Then he paused. "I don’t know! No real reason. But I think an economic reason can be made that Obama can be elected and he’s pledged to raise capital gains."  read more »

Family ties to Nursultan A. Nazarbayev (pictured), the only president in Kazakhstan’s 17-year post-U.S.S.R. history, are not necessarily enough to guarantee permanent affluence. The state charged his daughter’s ex-husband with kidnapping—simply retribution, the ex-son-in-law has said, for his own presidential ambitions.

But it’s definitely good to be the president’s brother. According to a February deed filed in city records just this week, Bolat Nazarbayev and his wife have paid around $20 million for a corner unit facing Central Park at the Plaza.  read more »

Chinese megastar Lang Lang, the hugely ebullient, swooned-over classical pianist, has a new duplex across the street from Carnegie Hall, according to city records.

His parents, onetime Chinese circus musician Guoren Lang and ex-telephone technician Xiulan Lan, paid $1.895 million last month for a duplex at City Spire on West 56th Street, according to city records.

“I’m right next to Carnegie Hall!” the younger Mr. Lang e-mailed from China, through a publicist. New York is “my favorite city in the world, so I just love living here!” he said. “Everything of the best resides in this city—music, theater, culture, food!”

The 25-year-old’s message was written just like he plays: Exclamatorily. “I think of the absurdist pundit Stephen Colbert, who promises not to read the news to his viewers but to feel the news at them,” Alex Ross wrote about Mr. Lang in The New Yorker last year. The Times calls him classical music’s hottest artist, but still sniffs at his gesticulating showmanship and “Dionysian” interpretations.

Yet it’s hard to not share his giddiness about his pieces or about his apartment, especially considering that he spent years of his childhood in a tumbledown studio in Beijing, where his father took him to be near a conservancy. It was so frigid in the winters that Guoren would get into his son’s bed beforehand to warm it, according to an upcoming autobiography. The man wasn’t always so cozy: “You are late! You can’t be trusted! You have ruined your life! You’ve ruined all our lives!” the father tells his son after an elementary school choir rehearsal runs late, which postpones solo lessons.

On the bright side, young Mr. Lang made his American debut in 2001 at Carnegie Hall, and now has a five-room, two-bedroom, 1,449-square-foot duplex just a few feet away, which means he won’t have far to go when he plays Stravinsky and Brahms there next year with the Met Orchestra.

According to the deed, the parents’ address is in Philadelphia, though they’re “still with me most of the time (even in New York),” Mr. Lang wrote, “so we still have lots of Chinese cooking in the apartment so it still feels like home and my upbringing will always be with me.”

mabelson@observer.com

The 30-year-old, English-accented, big-bearded Lower East Side nightlife king Simon Hammerstein, who calls his half-burlesque, semi-lewd supper club the Box a “theater of varieties,” just bought his first apartment, according to city records.

Last month, he paid $1.27 million for a 1,650-square-foot loft at 265 Water Street, one of those distressingly picture-perfect South Street Seaport buildings. It has ancient red brick and perfect little green shutters; an original wooden staircase; a manual elevator; and, as icing, was designed as a hardtack biscuit bakery when Ulysses S. Grant was president.

The loft has a 54-foot-long living/dining room, with a separate office and bedroom, according to the listing. “I think in the beginning he’s going to take out walls, and then see what he needs, which is a good way to do it,” said the listing broker, Liz Dworkin. The floor plan says there’s something called a “shoe room” off the bedroom: Maybe the buyer has a lot of footwear to store.

Mr. Hammerstein, a boarding school dropout, great-great-grandson of the founder of midtown’s ballroom, and grandson of legendary songwriter Oscar Hammerstein II, did not respond to phone calls, a request through his publicist, or a text message to his cell phone that asked if the apartment was bought with inherited money or with the windfall from the Box.

The latter seems possible, at least considering that he’s said the theater’s tables charge up to $2,000. (One would have to sell just 63.5 tables at $2,000 a pop to get the $127,000 for a 10 percent deposit on a $1.27 million loft.)

But 256 Water Street isn’t Box-like; it’s a “small friendly co-op,” according to the listing. On the downside, a still-life photographer in the building named Greg Bloom (war photojournalist James Nachtwey is apparently a neighbor, too) said Wall Street people venture over for happy hour, though tourists don’t wander up from Fulton Street too often.

mabelson@observer.com

The East Village is a big step closer to getting a brand-new mansion and losing a 15-unit, 60-room, 11,600-square-foot rent-stabilized tenement building.

On Tuesday morning, the New York State Court of Appeals unanimously decided that a shipping heir named Alistair Economakis and his wife, Catherine, can try to take over all of 47 East Third Street without getting approval from the state’s low-income housing agency.

The couple and a group of investors bought the building in October 2002 amidst bankruptcy proceedings, but soon they became sole owners, and filed plans for a mansion with about four bedrooms, a library, a study, a den, a gym with an adjoining shower, a dining room, one living room and another two-story living room, a playroom, and a nanny’s suite.

Since then, the family has taken over six apartments, which leaves nine units with tenants who’ve refused to get bought out. Lower courts have disagreed on whether the owners can recover the rest of the building for themselves without approval from New York’s Department of Housing and Community Renewal, but Tuesday’s decision says the laws are plain.

“Obviously, I am very pleased,” Mr. Economakis wrote on his Web site. But the whole thing isn’t his yet: In civil court he’ll have to establish what’s called “good-faith intention” to live in the house. But his plans seem serious: A $35,000 proposal to convert the building’s storefront into a residential garage was pre-filed on Friday with the city.

“I think the story would be ‘Dog Bites Man,’ versus ‘Man Bites Dog,’” the landlord’s lawyer, Jeffrey Turkel, said earlier in the week when asked about a potential decision in his client’s favor. He meant that it shouldn’t be surprising a court would side with the landlord, considering that the city’s laws swo plainly allow an owner to claim “one or more” stabilized units, as long as there’s that “good faith.”

Dave Pultz, a soft-spoken 56-year-old film laboratory technician who lives on the first floor, said the court ignored the tenants’ main argument: Not only are the owners taking over rent-stabilized apartments, he said, they’re destroying them by turning the tenement into a mansion. “We think this was just a gambit to increase the value of the building and make them richer,” he said.

So are the tenants looking forward to fighting the landlord in civil court, where, after all, he still has to prove he’s not going to flip the property? “I don’t know if we’re looking forward to it,” Mr. Pultz said, “but we’re going to go.”

mabelson@observer.com

When this column broke the news late last month that the famously mouthed 23-year-old Scarlett Johansson had sold her duplex loft at 66 Leonard Street for $1,898,000, a $52,000 loss from what she’d paid in January 2006, some relatively heartfelt concern was expressed for the starlet’s New York real estate choices.

After all, it’s genuinely impossible to remember a plump apartment that didn’t hugely appreciate over the past few years.  read more »

Glee and kookiness left Greenwich Village sometime during the Giuliani administration, when all the frat bankers and handbag-carried Yorkies moved in.

Still, it’s massively odd that the designer Betsey Johnson, the fluorescent-colored, polka-dotted cat lady of New York fashion, a 65-year-old that makes 1983-era Cyndi Lauper look gray-scale by comparison, has abandoned the Village for the Upper East Side.

According to a deed filed yesterday, she spent $1,854,000 on a just-listed apartment at 30 East 85th Street. The condo’s one-sentence listing is boring: one bedroom; two bathrooms; a terrace; a doorman; a washer/dryer.

“It’s a cool building!” her broker Gina Serman said when asked why Ms. Johnson would live among high-nosed Upper East Siders. “It’s not exactly, you know—but her daughter’s in the same building! That’s the secret. I sold her daughter a nice huge apartment there.”

Ms. Johnson emailed later: “I MOVED UPTOWN INTO MY NEW BABY PINK HEAVEN TO BE CLOSER TO MY GRANDCHILDREN. AM HAPPILY ‘GRANDMA-ING’ 24/7 WHILE SHOPPING ‘TIL I’M DROPPING.”

“It’s kind of a chic area; it’s, like, nice, you know?” Ms. Serman, her broker, said. “Don’t forget she’s got two stores on the Upper East Side; there’s one on Madison Avenue literally a few blocks away.”

(Plus, the Upper East Side is where she founded her first boutique, in 1969, around the time of her brief marriage to the Velvet Underground’s John Cale.)

Meanwhile, Ms. Johnson is not fully out of the Village. Her bright-pink, glass-bricked, gold-tasseled duplex loft at 45 Fifth Avenue (pictured) went on the market last year for $3.6 million, before going down to $3.1 and now $2.495 million, according to the listings Web site StreetEasy. “She’s still, like, hot,” Ms. Serman said, “and she goes all over the place; she’s still Betsey.”

The huge S&P/Case-Shiller Index just showed that American home prices dove down in the first quarter of 2008 at the scariest rate in two decades. And yet, ignoring the warning from index co-founder Robert Shiller that Manhattan is “not immune, I can guarantee you that,” the most expensive co-ops in New York continue to levitate, rising higher and higher above the nationwide calamity.

According to a source, the 15-room, six-bathroom, four-fireplace co-op at 1030 Fifth Avenue, put on the market for $34 million on Wednesday, May 14, found a buyer fewer than seven days later.

The seller is psychoanalyst Christine Wasserstein, who kept the apartment after her divorce from New York magazine publisher Bruce Wasserstein, the billionaire CEO of Lazard. A source unrelated to the deal said Mr. Wasserstein was offered the apartment but turned it down—which, if true, would make sense, considering that he’s built his own $26.5 million duplex co-op down the block.

Still, the 1030 Fifth apartment’s floor plan is something to salivate over. The 19.5-foot-wide private landing leads to a 33-foot-long corner living room (with wood-burning fireplace), which goes to the 20-by-20-foot library (with wood-burning fireplace), which leads to the 25.5-foot-long dining room (with wood-burning fireplace), which goes to the 17-foot-long breakfast room, which leads to the 20-foot-long kitchen (with a center island), which goes to one of the two maids’ rooms.

Four of the bedrooms have walk-in closets, and the master suite has two. On the downside, the monthly maintenance is $13,441.

Even though the $34 million Fifth Avenue apartment found a buyer in a handful of days, records suggest nothing in the building has ever sold for more than even a third of that amount. (And here’s a less meaningful tidbit: Nixon villain John Mitchell paid $250,000 for the multi-fireplace apartment 35 years ago, according to a member of the family that sold it to Mitchell.)

Michele Kleier, the listing broker, had no comment.

Even in the absurd little world of Upper East Side real estate, there are few fights as magnificent as the feud between billionaire financier J. Christopher Flowers and the developer Dominion Management over the townhouse at 12 East 73rd Street. And unless there’s a drastic Act V turn, Mr. Flowers, who also happens to own New York’s most expensive mansion just two blocks away, won that feud this month.

Four justices of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division unanimously decided two weeks ago that Dominion owes the billionaire money for unfinished work at the townhouse, which he bought from them in November 2006 for $17 million, and then flipped a few months later for $23 million.

A lower court will likely decide this year just how much Mr. Flowers will get back from Dominion, a company run by the Rinzler real estate family, but a source close to the billionaire told The Observer he wants “in excess of two million dollars.”

Things were more innocent back in January 2004, when Mr. Flowers first signed a contract to buy the place. The closing date was set for that July, when the unrenovated house was supposed to be finished by Dominion. By March, there were problems with a skylight; then came squabbles over limestone in the rear yard. By August, the “parties’ conduct toward one another apparently lost its cordiality,” according to the court.

Dominion complained that Mr. Flowers “belligerently demanded the completion of the construction … and threatened to otherwise tie up the property in litigation for years to come.” Meanwhile, his wife apparently “ceased cooperating” with Dominion.

Amid “posturing and gamesmanship” from both sides, according to the decision, Dominion made a bold move, signing a contract to sell the townhouse to someone else for $18 million. The next month, they told Mr. Flowers that his contract for the house was terminated on account of his failure to pay for bonus changes he’d ordered.

But because Dominion never made the appropriate written demands for that extra payment, the termination was invalid: A judge forced the two parties to close, and by November 2006, the townhouse was finally, officially, Mr. Flowers’.

That didn’t last long. In late 2006, he spent $53 million, a still-standing New York townhouse record, for the Harkness Mansion nearby, and a few months later, the day after April Fool’s, he sold off the East 73rd house he’d finally bought from Dominion, making a tidy $6 million profit. “This isn’t about the money,” the source close to Mr. Flowers said. “It was about the fact that Rinzler did something that was detestable to them, and they were not going to let them get away with it.”

So the fight wasn’t over. Mr. Flowers actually appealed that judge’s decision to close—because the judge didn’t award him money from Dominion to make up for the fact that they hadn’t delivered a fully completed townhouse as contractually obligated. “Did we yell at each other?” the source said. “Yes, we did, as a matter of fact. There’s been a lot of yelling”—over questions like why a billionaire should want an abatement if he was willing to close before the house was completed, and especially if he flipped for such a big profit. “And the answer was: This is America! He pays taxes, and the law should be applied equally to everybody.”

The appellate justices all agreed. “After all,” said another source involved in the trial, “a contract’s a contract.”

News of the decision was first reported in The New York Law Journal.

In early April, the New York Post’s weekly real estate column ran an item on View co-host Joy Behar that said she’d bought a new apartment at Broadway and West 89th Street “for approximately $3.5 million,” and was selling her old co-op in the building.

But according to a deed filed this month in city records, Ms. Behar actually paid $2,555,000 for the place, and she hasn’t sold her old apartment.  read more »

Madonna used to sit on the steps of the new-wave dreamland Danceteria—where she was a hat-check girl, Keith Haring was a busboy and the Cramps played next to the Buzzcocks or Birthday Party—and tell nightlife kings like Steve Rubell she was going to be a very big star. In 1982, when the club reopened at 30 West 21st Street, she got a DJ to play her demo there.

But it’s an indestructible physical law of Manhattan real estate that any building that once housed something artful and interesting will be replaced by luxury condos: The three-story dance floor on West 21st didn’t quite survive the Reagan administration, and, by 2004, the building was sold for $12.5 million.

A year ago the buyer flipped for twice as much, $25 million, to Beck Street Capital, founded by the investor Kevin Comer.

Beck Street is turning the building into 11 floor-through apartments, about 4,000 square feet apiece, that will go on the market next month for $5,895,000 to $7,950,000 each. Then there’s the 3,038-square-foot duplex penthouse (with six terraces and a rooftop pool) that costs $7,795,000, plus a bigger townhouse apartment downstairs priced at $9.25 million.

“Legitimacy is the one word I can really give to it,” Mr. Comer said. He meant a very precise kind of legitimacy: “Three-inch solid marble kitchen countertops … Our floors are all made of legitimate, solid wood.”

He said the hip ’80’s pedigree was interesting, but that the building should be renovated back to its pre-Danceteria roots: “We like to refurbish buildings and bring the soul back to them.” So, as these things go, the condo will be called Alma, Spanish for soul. “The ’80’s literally drained the soul from the building,” said the marketing broker, Darren Sukenik. “Madonna was, like, passed out on the floor for three years. The building was so raped and devoid of soul for years.”

But does Mr. Sukenik, who went to the club underage, with black hair down over one eye (“Echo and the Bunnymen, that was pretty much my favorite,” he said), regret that a new-wave landmark will become condos? “You never know what’s going to be next. Everybody gets their turn,” he said.

Next year the apartments will be delivered with lifestyle designers, in-loft wine cellars and gyms, radiant-heat floors and daily maid service (with chocolates on pillows). “It’s absolutely celebrities, families, Europeans, anybody that gets it,” Mr. Sukenik said, “because if you don’t get it, you’re not going to get it.”

Putin and Bush no longer gaze soul-searchingly into each other’s eyes, but despite the two nations’ dissolving comradeship, Russians, even friends of the Kremlin, keep buying up massive New York condos.

Earlier this month, around the time that two American military attachés were expelled for their visit to a Siberian military factory, the Moscow-based Valentin Yudashkin, probably the country’s most famous fashion designer (and the man hired by the Russian Defense Ministry last year to redo its uniforms), bought the duplex penthouse at the Curzon House on East 62nd Street.

According to city records, he paid $5.7 million.

“If I recall, he came into the apartment almost on the way to the airport, saw the apartment, liked it, and the next day his broker started negotiating,” listing agent Roger Erickson said, though he wouldn’t comment on the deal itself.

“Truthfully, I’m actually working with some very significant Russian buyers right now, but they’re great buyers,” he said. One of them invests for Russian billionaires, he said, and the other has the local rights to western jewelry brands like Tiffany’s. “I’ve worked with Russians involved in bricks; it’s just amazing, so many different industries that became extremely profitable.”

Mr. Yudashkin’s broker, Adam Modlin, took his client to see the Plaza, where there are Kremlin friends like banker Vladimir Stolyarenko (plus critics like Russian gambling titan Boris Belotserkovsky). New Yorkers assume Russians want name-brand condos, Mr. Modlin said, “but it turned out surprisingly not to be the case here, and in fact this client is very low-key and unassuming.”

It’s true that Curzon House is relatively low-key, but still the duplex penthouse has 10-foot ceilings, a 26-foot-long living room, 1,700 square feet of roof terrace space, two bedrooms with skylights, even a view into Joan Rivers’ apartment, both brokers said.

Moments after signing the contract, according to Mr. Modlin, one of the designer’s Russian dignitary friends said he wanted a condo just like it. “I represent a bevy of these Russian oligarchs and influential government-related types, and so like anything else, similar to the way I represent the top people in professional sports”—A-Rod and Johnny Damon are clients—“these are small groups of people that are all related.”

As for Mr. Erickson, he said his two Russian clients are looking at condos priced between $20 million and $50 million. “I actually have things that are not officially for sale that are asking over $100 million”—no New York City residence has ever been listed for more than $70 million—“so $50 million now isn’t all the way to the top.”

Very blond, well-boned, expensively jeaned buyers have been pouring into East Village apartments for so long that it’s hard to find new excuses to complain about the area’s über-gentrification. But then again, it’s hard to remember when someone as upsettingly young as Lily Donaldson, the 21-year-old Vogue cover girl, spent anything like $2.2 million on a neighborhood apartment, especially one that happens to be as far east as Avenue B.

Her new two-bedroom place on Tompkins Square Park around East Eighth Street could be the most expensive co-op ever sold on the block, according to listing broker Danny Davis.

She has Brazilian cherry wood floors (“that glow with the setting sun,” according to his listing), two bathrooms with original pedestal sinks and cast iron tubs, a 40-foot-long living room with six windows facing three directions, and, of course, a dressing room off one of the two bedrooms.

On the downside, the building is massively nondescript and un-frilled, plus the apartment needs work. “I’d put money into it,” Mr. Davis said, “I’d bet she will, too.”

Nevertheless, it sold for well above its $1.895 million asking price from this December. “I had six offers on the place,” said the broker, though he wouldn’t discuss the deal itself. The model’s rivals included a husband and wife from Goldman Sachs, a bachelor who owns a PR firm, and a woman with a trust fund.

But Ms. Donaldson was “the highest bidder and very qualified. The board liked her and approval was unanimous, which is always a concern when you’re dealing with a young model,” Mr. Davis said. “You’re never sure how a board would see her.”

The last sale in the building, according to city records, was a $650,000 deal just one floor down. That was in October 2004; nowadays, Avenue B has a lot of models and PR executives willing to pay more. Those new buyers make things nice for brokers like Mr. Davis, who wears slicked-back hair and a big smile in his Web site’s photograph: He left for Mexico after the apartment was listed in December, held just one open house when he came back, and accepted Ms. Donaldson’s offer a week later.

After closing, Mr. Davis went south again for a 40th birthday celebration in Jamaica: “Twenty-one people, all friends, no kids,” he said. “Awesome place—yeah, it was great.”

Being Rosie O'Donnell means you get to have Donald Trump say funny things about you very loudly, and you get to blog in lower-case verse ("a new musical on broadway/ my god i loved it/ i dont have the words/ to explain its brilliance"), and buy the scale model of your new Manhattan condo building.

Last summer, the ex-talk show host signed a $1.97 million contract for a two-bedroom pied-a-terre at the new steel-and-tinted glass condo called Platinum, on West 46th Street. But at a party she threw in the building's sales center last month--a fundraiser for her charity Rosie's Broadway Kids--Ms. O'Donnell was overheard saying that she had liked the condominium's model so much she wanted to buy it from the developer. And the developer, called SJP Residential Properties, agreed to sell it.  read more »

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

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

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

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 to