Max Abelson

Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? is not a particularly good or funny or incisive inside-Hollywood movie, but no one who was leaving the film's premiere on Wednesday evening at the Museum of Modern Art seemed to mind. Afterward, on the second and third floors of the nearby 21 Club, Sean Penn--who before the film started had spent at least three minutes having a gesticulation-heavy conversation with Robert De Niro--was at Table 6. In the film, he plays himself playing the lead role in an overly violent action movie.

What are his thoughts on the financial crisis? “I’m not going to comment tonight," he said. "I’ve had a couple, I’m going to leave it at that."

A few minutes earlier, a significant-looking balding man walked by and said very loudly, “Harvey Weinstein will never speak to me again!” Then an 80-pound woman with razor lips and very touchable-looking hair adjusted the tight, thick leather choker around her neck. Nearby, Men’s Health editor in chief Dave Zinczenko was blocking the way by talking with two men. “This bastard always steals things!” one said to the other about Mr. Zinczenko. Har-har-har! Around the corner there was Cybill Shepherd, dress cut low, talking to four men. And Barbara Walters and Steve Buscemi and Peter Dinklage; Roger Waters, Bob Balaban and Jay McInerney.  read more »

In a jaw-dropping reversal to all the fear and anxiety that's been rippling through the city's high-end real estate lately, an East River mansion, 7 Sutton Square, has sold for $32.5 million, well above its $25 million asking price.

According to city records, the seller is William F. Reilly, a retired magazine mogul.  read more »

The story was reported by Max Abelson, Eliot Brown and Dana Rubinstein; and written by Ms. Rubinstein.

New York's real estate community doesn't just love Mayor Bloomberg. It lurves him. And it's greeting the news of his third-term bid accordingly.

A sampling:

"Love him," said developer and landlord Alex Sapir. "Let's keep him forever."

"It's the best news I've heard in years," said residential superbroker Michelle Kleier, president and chairman of Gumley Haft Kleier.

"I can't think of anyone who's done more for New York... in my lifetime," said Howard Lorber, chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman owner.

"I think he's the greatest mayor we've ever had," said Douglas Durst, of the Durst Organization. Mr. Durst even thinks President Bush should call Mr. Bloomberg down to Washington to "straighten out the financial mess."

"I think the country needs him more than the city does," he said.

Thirty-something Dumbo developer Jed Walentas called Mr. Bloomberg, "the best mayor New York has had - certainly in my lifetime."

And Donald Trump said he begs the mayor ("Michael," to him) to run whenever they meet.

"Any time I see Michael I say, please run," Mr. Trump said. "I don't want to get into the details, but any time I see him. I think it's very important."

So what gives? Why all the love for Massachusetts' own, Michael Bloomberg?  read more »

The gory fallout from the mortgage crisis is more nightmarish in Middle America—where there are “Foreclosures R Us!” ads (with actual exclamation points) in some local real estate sales pamphlets—but be sure to pity Park Avenue, too.

Earlier this month, The Observer pointed out that four Lehman Brothers executives had spent, before their firm’s fall, a combined $46.58 million on spreads in one Manhattan building alone. Besides the fact that the city suddenly has a lot less super-rich home buyers to snatch super-expensive real estate, there’s the question of what will happen to the marble-floored mega-apartments that all our freshly fallen executives bought at their peaks.  read more »

To understand the real estate deals of high-end hairstylists is to understand the real estate of New York itself. Truly, hairstylists are the great undiscovered Manhattan housing bellwether.

Consider that in the shinier, happier days of January 2007, the Gerard Bollei Salon hair colorist Thomas Frasca and his partner, Alan Adler, sold their scrupulous Perry Street town­house for $9.1 million, though they had paid less than one-fourth that price. Then this February, as Manhattan’s bubble got slightly less furious, Orlando Pita, who started a salon a few years ago that charged a city-high $800 for a cut (about $10 per minute, according to one article), signed a contract for an apartment at 101 Warren.  read more »

It would take tightly shut eyes and a gargantuan leap of faith to not be at least slightly panicked about the tiptop of New York City’s high-end real estate. Lawsuits over record-breaking condos at the Plaza are flying back and forth; star townhouses are languishing on the market; and brokers who barely six months ago wondered aloud when we’d be seeing $100 million deals are quietly complaining about having to sing lullabies to angst-ridden clients.

But all is not lost. A source said Monday that the Democratic Party fund-raising stars Carl Spielvogel and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel are in contract to sell their seventh-floor apartment at 720 Park Avenue for around $37 million, though they paid only $20 million just two years ago.  read more »

Last week, eight days after the Federal Reserve agreed to an $85 billion bailout for the American International Group, and one day after the F.B.I. was first reported to be investigating its collapse, recently retired AIG executive vice president Robert M. Sandler bought a $3.45 million apartment at the Hampshire House on Central Park South.

He and his wife, Annette, paid in cash.

According to a Corcoran listing, their new three-bedroom, 2,045-square-foot apartment has a “top-of-the-line windowed kitchen with custom cabinetry”; a master bedroom suite with two walk-in closets; a steam shower and Jacuzzi; new herringbone floors; and a $4,333 monthly maintenance fee.  read more »

Last month, in a quite eloquently titled post ("Goodbye to His-and-Hers Whirlpool Baths: A-Rod Lists Trump Park Condo"), The Observer reported that Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez would be listing his Trump Park apartment for around $13 million.

Yesterday, the day that his team's epic postseason streak came to a very depressing end, Mr. Rodriguez's apartment officially hit the market, according to this listing. The asking price is $14 million--despite the fact that the player reportedly paid $7.5 million for the apartment. (As it happens, city records suggest that his price could have actually been as low as $6,910,000, less than half what he's now asking.)

According to the listing, the 4,600-square-foot spread has a dining area, a "library/den," a "dressing area," a windowed chef's kitchen, and, of course, an en-suite master bathroom.

On Sept. 17, just as his late mother Brooke Astor’s $46 million duplex co-op was coming back on the market after a summer hiatus, and one day before a court appearance, Anthony D. Marshall slouched in his white living room armchair, one hand resting on his neck. The senatorial 84-year-old, unsmiling and handsome in his gold-buttoned navy blazer, blue-checked white shirt, pressed gray-striped pants and black loafers, said he had regrets. “Oh, yes. But that’s awfully…” He paused. “To be retrospective about anything is being retrospective.

“You can’t change the past.”

Nearly a year after pleading not guilty to a 16-count criminal indictment that accuses him of stealing millions from his mother while she was suffering from Alzheimer’s, American-born but Victorian-voiced Mr.  read more »

There was once a time when Soho apartments actually belonged to artists, who would then sell their apartments to other artists, as opposed to, say, balding, Diesel-shirted hedge fund executives. Nowadays, there remains a tiny sliver of artist-to-artist sales in New York City, even deals between artists represented by the same galleries.

But it’s not that those artists are friends who drink gin together and share cigarettes (or an even slightly defined neighborhood community).

Earlier this month, the epic Glasgow-born video artist Douglas Gordon (he does photography and sculpture, too) sold his 2,000-square-foot loft at 225 Lafayette Street  read more »

This Monday, a few hours after a penthouse apartment at Central Park South’s copper-roofed Hampshire House went on the market for $10.9 million, this reporter called up the listing broker, Elia Clemente, and asked if his client would be willing to talk about the place. Records show the 1,800-square-foot unit was sold in 2005 to a personal injury lawyer named Eleanor P. Vale, who paid only $1,515,000 for the place.

On Tuesday morning, Ms. Vale left this voice mail: “The reason I have to sell it is that I’m not in financial trouble, but I have family that is. And it’s my son, and a lot of grandchildren; they’re in this small town, and they have all this debt, and it’s just made me very nervous.  read more »

This time next year New York’s gorgeously extravagant real estate market could very well be a thing of the past. Will we all long, teary-eyed, for the days when makeup entrepreneurs bought nice Chelsea co-ops for a few million dollars one year and sold them a few months later for a few million more?

Either way, as New York’s financial crisis deepened this week, it was a bit odd to watch the wave of incredibly large apartment deals pop up in city records—deals that were done months ago, but because of delays at the Office of the City Register weren’t recorded and filed until recently.  read more »

Location: In 2006, you went after the developer Aby Rosen’s plans for a glass tower at 980 Madison in The Times, writing that the Landmarks Preservation Commission would let him build whatever he wanted. They’ve since made him and his partners redraft and scale back plans. Are you glad you won?

Mr. Wolfe: Well, that’s not over yet. They did try again, with what was in effect a plan for a tall glass building lying down. You see in plans and renderings a slab maybe three stories high, but it stretches over a huge area. That building, between 76th and 77th, 980 Madison, is a whole block! .  read more »

Brown Harris Stevens is bigger than the famously blue-blooded boutique real estate brokerage Edward Lee Cave, but it has the same genteel glow: Brown Harris brokers have monogrammed shirts and Italian leather shoes, they're always quite appropriate, and they tend to take vacations in the Hamptons.

So it's incredibly odd to receive a virulent press release from brokerage president Hall F. Willkie (who, according to his online bio, "lives on Manhattan's East Side and on a working farm in upstate New York with chickens, ducks, and four horses, including 'heavy hunters' and a Percheron which he enjoys riding in his leisure time"). And it's even odder to hear Mr.  read more »

In April, when Leslie and Brian Brille, the global head of investment banking for Bank of America, put their East 69th Street mansion on the market for $32 million, only three years after they bought it from Jim Henson’s estate for $12.4 million, this reporter wondered about fickleness.

“He decided,” broker Carrie Chiang said about the banker earlier this year, “he wants a doorman.”

In retrospect, it was unfair of The Observer to even bring up fickleness, considering that the house has been bought up by a couple who have reached an entirely new, genuinely awesome, word-redefining level of picky, vacillating indecisiveness.  read more »

Since dawn on Monday, top Manhattan brokers and the universe of real-estate-obsessive types who surround them have been agonizing over the fate of New York’s iron-gated, oak-floored, marble-foyered real estate. Will the apartment-friendly bonus season even exist? Will foreigners suddenly get antsy about investing in mammoth pied-à-terres? Even if prices go down, will whiz-kid financiers still be gobbling up realty later this year and next year and the year after that?

Maybe they’ll all take solace in the story of Ray Iwanowski, a hedge fund manager who just bought a 4,184-square-foot apartment at 823 Park Avenue, which may prove that select financiers whose groups lose a few billion dollars during rough times are still willing to buy up full-floor, nine-room, five-bedroom, two-fireplace apartments.  read more »

It seems at least slightly likely that the days of Wall Street’s onyx-coated hyper-prosperity are over, and that New York’s era of perpetually broken real estate records (the hedge fund manager Scott Bommer paid $46 million for a co-op in January; in July, a Tisch heir was said to be paying $48 million for a co-op; this month Mr. Bommer sold his place for $48.8 million) was some sort of fleeting, irrational fluke.

But whereas everyone long ago accepted that American homeowners hugely erred by assuming their home values could only go up, and that Wall Street went even further astray by borrowing billions to make sour mortgage investments based on that optimism, the top tier of New York City’s real estate market still seems to consider itself magically protected.  read more »

Superior Ink, Robert A. M. Stern’s new brick-and-stone, townhouse-and-apartment development on West 12th Street (one of the gaggle of buildings he’s designed for the Related Companies, the group controlled by Miami Dolphins co-owner Steve Ross) hasn’t been the same kind of absurdly walloping multibillion-dollar triumph as 15 Central Park West, another Stern-designed trophy.

But it hasn’t done badly. A source told The Observer Monday that a top-floor sprawl is in contract to sell to Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander, a New Jersey-bred, N.Y.U.-educated investor. Mr. Alexander—who’s a vegetarian and animal rights activist (Rockets dancers have been seen in “Animals Have Rights” shirts; animal-shaped piñatas have been banned from Rockets promotions)—will be paying somewhere around  read more »

Dolly Lenz, the only New York City broker with a Blackberry ad, $748,319,000 in yearly sales (though that was 2006, to be fair), and a sworn indifference to dominating top-broker award ceremonies, appears a bit more than halfway through David Patrick Columbia's famous social diary today.

"I started out the evening at a cocktail reception at the penthouse apartment of Ann Ziff who was hosting it with Thomas Renyi (as Committee Chairs) and Cheryl and Philip Milstein (as Dinner Chairs) for 'Lincoln Center’s Night of Dinners Celebrating Fifth Years,'" Mr. Columbia wrote. It isn't clear if Ms. Lenz spends every night in the company of such excellent surnames, but she's center and smiling in a big photograph with Ms.  read more »

The headlines today (for example: "There Will Be Blood"), are enough to make New York real estate obsessives, who are mostly anxious types anyway, go crazy.

This morning, my colleague Tom Acitelli listed six ways today's Wall Street turmoil will affect real estate (and he listed apartment prices at the top. But Crain's just went a few steps further by chiming in with an article whose subhead says: "The latest crisis on Wall Street could deal a severe blow to apartment prices in Manhattan."

"The extent of this problem is mind-boggling," one hilariously oft-quoted appraiser says in the article. "The ’09 market, and possibly 2010, are going to be characterized by lower volume and some weakness in price levels.  read more »

Two days ago, The Observer reported that zinc magnate Bill Flaherty and his southern belle wife, Tina Santi Flaherty, would be putting their duplex penthouse on the market, on account of an intricate Palm Beach divorce. "Since last April," I wrote, "their court docket has gone up to 837 items; over a dozen involve the penthouse."

Late yesterday, the posh Corcoran broker Leighton Candler (she of the Astor listing) officially put the 10-room apartment on the market for $43 million. "Most every room" opens onto terraces, the listing says. "From an English pine paneled library to an expansive master suite this apartment is a piece of perfection.  read more »

Nicely suited Upper East Side agents openly chat about death leading to plush real estate sales (one broker is said to keep a list of the most aged owners at beloved 740 Park Avenue), but divorce is more gauche than simply passing on, which makes it a trickier subject.

Over the past few months, neighborhood agents have quietly been wondering what will happen to the penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue, the chicly restricted limestone building where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived and died.  read more »

In 1981, back before Tribeca was filmic, yellowfin tuna-eating Tribeca, a printing company executive named Stanley Scott bought the landmarked building he’d been in since 1966, 145 Hudson Street.

Forty-two years after he moved there, the building’s penthouse, a glass-skinned duplex marketed by Stribling for $34.5 million, one of the biggest listings ever downtown—and a big reason why the building has slogged through years of troubles—has gone to contract, according to the brokerage’s Web site.

If the deal closes above $33.15 million, the price that a double-wide West 10th Street townhouse sold for last year, it will be a downtown residential record.  read more »

Joel Schumacher. The 69-year-old director’s bubblegum 1997 film Batman & Robin was so viciously mindless (“That’s right, Dick. I want them so much, I can taste it”) that his Wikipedia page gives one paragraph on his legendary ’80s brat pack films, one on his Grisham films (including The Client), then six paragraphs on B&R. His following work is squished under the header “Post-Batman”; the section on Schumacher parodies has seven paragraphs.

Even the New York City Department of Finance’s Office of the City Register apparently has something against him: The city deed for his new apartment, bought late last month, repeatedly misspells Mr.  read more »

“We were admiring your security cameras,” a man in a paint-splattered Ralph Lauren polo shirt said last Sunday afternoon, standing next to his wife outside of 11 Spring Street. “We need some for our building.” He was talking to Caroline Cummings, the 27-year-old who bought 11 Spring from Rupert Murdoch’s elder son, Lachlan, exactly two years ago for $12 million.

Back then the gargantuan 19th-century brick building, once horse stables, was drenched in graffiti, among other things, although the facade’s huge street art was so beloved that Ms. Cummings helped put on an art show before pressure-hosing the walls as renovations began.  read more »

That mysterious Plaza buyer who is awfully upset about his $53.5 million triplex penthouse at The Plaza (and its "unappealing drainage grates") isn't so mysterious anymore. According to an email mistakenly sent to The Observer, the buyer is buzz-cut Russian financier Andrei Vavilov, a hedge fund maverick who became a deputy finance minister under Yeltsin in 1992, survived an assassination attempt in a Kremlin parking lot in 1996, made a fortune in Russian oil in 2002, and earned his first Times profile last year.

He's suing The Plaza's developer, El-Ad, to get back his teeth-rattling $10.7 million deposit on a two-unit penthouse, claiming to be the victim of a bait-and-switch.  read more »

Scrambling what would have been one of the country's biggest residential deals ever, the would-be buyer of a two-unit, three-level penthouse at The Plaza is taking the building's developer, El-Ad, to court.

According to a copy of the suit emailed to The Observer today, an anonymous buyer (listed as Penthouse 2009, Inc. and Penthouse 2001, Inc.) has backed out of a $53.5 million deal for a gargantuan spread in the newly redone condo and hotel. The suit demands that the buyer have the chance to get a $10.7 million (!!) deposit back, not to mention damages "believed to exceed $20,000,000" because of a bait and switch:

The Penthouses were bought, sight unseen, based upon representation made by El-Ad.

 read more »

A few minutes ago, the deed for that spectacularly, mind-bogglingly amazing $48,836,000 penthouse sale at 1060 Fifth Avenue was filed in city records. According to the deed, the deal was signed on July 29, which means the hedge fund manager Scott Bommer and wife Donya took exactly six months and six days to flip their $46 million penthouse for $2,900,000 more than they'd paid in January.

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, is what I’m saying," the investor Glenn Greenberg, who used to live in the apartment, told The Observer earlier this week when asked about the Bommers' sale. "Sometimes it’s no more complicated than somebody changes their mind and the opportunity presents itself. And they go live in something that suits them better.”

The buyer is listed anonymously on the deed as Park View Trust.

A while back, the developer of a new condo called the Hit Factory, a legendary recording studio that's, sadly, been turned into multimillion-dollar condominiums, told this reporter that the music world had more or less moved on from New York, and that real estate had taken its place. "Frankly," he said, "I think it's had its day." (Still, his building kept the old rock 'n' theme: "People will tell their friends, won't they, 'Hey, I'm locating to the Hit Factory!'" the developer offered.)

Real estate salesmen will be using the hip kids and their music to sell real estate until the end of time, but today the Web site  read more »

Even though Tom Wolfe didn’t include 1060 Fifth Avenue in his canonical 1985 list of the most high-heeled, high-nosed, high-fenced Manhattan buildings, it’s the kind of co-op where the very proper, philanthropic financiers who are allowed to buy the most massively expensive apartments are, by silent decree, supposed to stay for at least a few presidential administrations.

“We certainly would not look favorably if we thought someone was coming in with the notion of turning around and leaving quickly,” an owner at 1060 Fifth, built by J.E.R. Carpenter in 1928, said this week. George Soros stayed in the building after his divorce (his ex-wife got $24 million for the apartment).  read more »

Ian Buruma, one of the world’s genuinely sharp, eloquent public intellectuals, has bought a condo in one of New York’s genuinely unsightly new condos. According to city records, he spent $1,495,000 on an apartment at the Kalahari on West 116th Street. He and Eri Hotta, who taught at Oxford until 2005, closed last month.

On the plus side, their building has solar paneling and wind-generated energy, music practice rooms, sustainable bamboo floors in the apartments, and 120 lottery-drawn affordable housing units to go with the luxury spaces.

But the Africa-inspired facade just doesn’t work: When the new building was ranked as the city’s single ugliest condo by Time Out New York late last year, the magazine wrote: “This is reminiscent of the Kalahari Desert.  read more »

There’s something so inoffensive and smiley about Ben Stiller that he can make phallus-in-the-zipper jokes (or write and direct a Hollywood blockbuster that heavily features blackface) but still come across as a really amiable fellow who likes to stay in close proximity to his aging parents.

So it makes sense that he just spent $10 million on a duplex in a prewar orange-brick co-op on Riverside Drive in the West 80s, the same building that his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, have lived in for years. Mr. Stiller’s name isn’t on the deed, filed last week, though the duplex was bought through a trust that shares the actor’s billing address.  read more »

In what will surely go down as one of the most splendid flips in the history of ultra-posh New York City real estate, the young hedge fund executive Scott Bommer and his wife Donya, once an anchor for "Good Day Philadelphia," have sold their duplex penthouse at 1060 Fifth Avenue for around $48.9 million, according to a source.

Not only does the sale come in the middle of a relatively sludgy, even gloomy real estate market, but there's the downright flabbergasting fact that the Bommers bought the apartment only this January. They paid $46 million, setting a record for a Manhattan co-op sale.  read more »

Two years ago, in one of the most awesomely honest interviews ever given about a very, very expensive apartment, Seema Kalia, the wife of hedge fund manager Vedula Murti, told The Observer about her new $7,127,750 triplex in the 104-year-old mansion at 3 East 75th Street. "You know that sometimes people buy great houses and have no taste?" Ms. Kalia said then. "Well, we have no taste, so we put it in the hands of someone who does." She hired Madonna's designer, Jamie Drake, to fix up the space--not to mention The Dirty Sock Funtime Band to play for her 4-year-old daughter's friends in the apartment.  read more »

Fiscally conservative, octogenarian leveraged-buyout billionaires who served in Nixon’s cabinet can be incredibly generous to their buddies.

Pete Peterson, the co-founder and senior chairman of the Blackstone Group, and the chairman emeritus of the massively powerful Council on Foreign Relations, has bought that organization’s apartment at the huge Imperial House co-op on East 69th Street. According to city records, he paid the council $3,040,000.

Why would Mr. Peterson, who bought David Geffen’s $37.5 million duplex on Fifth Avenue last year, pick up a petite co-op? “Let me give you the background,” Mr. Peterson said after returning The Observer’s phone call, much to The Observer’s surprise.  read more »

Architects make for neurotic, itchy apartment buyers. “I would never live in anything I design,” Peter Eisenman told The Observer last year. “If you were a son of mine, I wouldn’t want you to be an architect because it’s a tough way to be in the world.”

But Enrique Norten, the star Mexican architect who was commissioned three years ago to build a Guggenheim museum in Guadalajara, spent $1,929,000 this month for an apartment at One York Street, the hefty, sharp building he designed in northern Tribeca.

He doesn’t mind living within his own work (he has a place in one of his Mexican buildings, Parque España), although he’s taking down some walls in the apartment, plus changing some finishes and appliances in the bathroom and the kitchen.  read more »

Seven months after getting disbarred for his ties to a personal-injury practice in Long Island City that belonged to a non-attorney who’d made his money in taxicab medallions, and 10 months after closing on a $35 million mansion on East 62nd Street that Madonna had bid on, the lawyer turned real estate investor Keith Rubenstein has made another real estate deal. But it’s more modest.

According to city records, he and his wife, Inga, an art collector and ex-model, spent $3.2 million on a two-bedroom duplex at 101 Warren Street, the massive new Tribeca condo building.

It’s a much smaller place than the penthouse (marketed as a “skyhome”) that Mr.  read more »

James H. Herbert II, the chairman and chief executive of the very ritzy First Republic Bank, listed his penthouse at Trump Parc East on Central Park South earlier this month for $38 million, nearly four times what he paid back in 2005.

That’s a sign that the annual onslaught of post-Labor Day real estate listings (most brokers don’t bother putting anything good on the market in hot, deadened August) will be as giddily ambitious as always. And considering that the apartment is being listed by Stribling at 25,866,600 euros (monthly maintenance fees and taxes are given bi-continentally, too), it’s also a sign that brokers are still hoping to lure the gaggle of foreign buyers that have been feasting on Manhattan real estate—despite evidence that the dollar is regaining some ground.  read more »

Last November--on what must have surely been a sad day for the kind of New Yorker who obsesses over 17-room Fifth Avenue apartments with ballroom ceilings imported from 17th-century Venetian palaces and marble staircases carved from Michelangelo’s quarry--the Kress family’s famous penthouse duplex at 1020 Fifth Avenue was taken off the market.

At that time, a source told The Observer that the listing, which, oddly, hadn’t been given to any one broker (though certain shiny-shoed brokers from certain brokerages were allowed to advertise the duplex on their Web sites), had come off the market because of “loose ends” that had to be cleared up by the estate.  read more »

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