Manhattan Transfers

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.