Michael Gross

Alex Gibney‘s documentary Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, based on my book 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building, aired worldwide last fall and is currently available for sale or rental in the iTunes store and on Hulu (as well as free online in the truncated-for-broadcast PBS version via Youtube). This week’s issue of The New Yorker is led by a story about Gibney’s film, detailing the pressure put on WNET, New York’s public television station, for broadcasting it. Though this is hardly the first time a wealthy subject has pushed back against revealing revelations, and 740 Park resident David Koch, the focus of the piece, makes an easy target for his political opponents, it’s still a… Continue reading

Michael Holtz (at right), the founder of the Smartflyer travel agency, owns four apartments in a West Side Highway condo, a fraction of the eleven he’s bought and sold in the last fifteen years (including one at Fifteen Central Park West and another in the boombastic One57). He’s the subject of my latest “On the Flip Side” column in Alexa Luxe Living in the New York Post. Continue reading

Did someone say, how was your weekend? Well, busy. First we were unwillingly evacuated from our home. So I didn’t have time to post about NASCAR champ Jeff Gordon listing his apartment at 15 Central Park West, subject of my just-completed next book, or about France selling the home of its UN ambassador at 740 Park, subject of an earlier real estate opus. Then, Le Monde published a story on the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute and its ball quoting my Rogues’ Gallery, and Gwyneth Paltrow, one of the select invited guests, opined that, “It sucked.” And finally, my exile on 57th Street ended with a new boom and thankfully, no bang. Developer Extell even apologized, sort of, and grudgingly, for treating One57′s… Continue reading

Wealth and powerlessness (the latter, mine) are the subject of an opinion piece, “In Manhattan Real Estate, Wealth and Power Are Relative,” that marks my return to the (online) pages of the New York Times. Continue reading

Spring Awakening producer Tracy Aron‘s Clarence True-designed mansion on West End Avenue is the focus of my latest Unreal Estate column in Avenue Magazine, in better building lobbies now. You can also read it here. Listing is on the Corcoran web site. Continue reading

In a followup to its revelation yesterday that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has charged admission for forty-plus years in violation of its lease, reporters Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein offer up Art of the $teal , a Sunday feature stuffed with more examples of the museum administration’s contempt for the public that owns its buildings, the land they sit on, and the art within. Gripepad supports the Met’s desire to collect admission, but finds its devotion to the public, to its own history and to the truth, in the words of its chief dissembler, a matter of interpretation. Continue reading

The New York Post filed a Freedom of Information Act request to gain access to the long-hidden agreement that–Metropolitan Museum of Art officials have always alleged, most recently in statement by museum director Thomas Campbell–gave them the right to charge admission. But reporter Julia Marsh‘s story today reveals that no such agreement exists. The link above does not include the response to the Post’s charges from Museum spokesman Harold Holzer that appears in the iPad version of the paper today. He calls the report “a matter of interpertation.” This from the same flack who called Rogues’ Gallery “highly misleading,” yet failed to point out a single error in its pages. Artful! Continue reading

I ran away to the circus two weekends back, or rather to Palm Springs and vicinity, where the Coachella circus had pitched its tents. My report on what I found is in tomorrow’s New York Post travel section. That’s Hope Springs, a lovely Desert Hot Springs resort, at right. Continue reading

In the last pages of 740 Park, written nine years ago, I challenged Stephen Schwarzman to live up to the standard set by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who’d once owned the private-equity chief’s apartment in that fabled building, and add significant philanthropy to his resume. It took a few years, but Schwarzman did take up that challenge, as has been noted in this space. Today’s New York Times finds the Blackstone boss in China, giving away money for good again, donating a third of the cost of a new $300 million scholarship program for study in China, and helping raise the rest. As at the New York Public Library, recipient of his first $100 million gift, which renamed its main building for him, the program and the new college (at… Continue reading

Alex Gibney‘s documentary Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, based on my book 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building, is now available for sale or rental in the iTunes store. UPDATE: This week’s issue of the New Yorker is led by a story about Gibney’s film, detailing the pressure put on WNET, New York’s public broadcasting station, for broadcasting it. Continue reading

Leonard Lauder‘s magnificent gift of a collection of Cubist masterpieces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art got front page treatment in the Times this morning. But the most interesting tid-bit was contained in the New York Post’s piece on the donation (which includes the Picasso at right). It quotes Lauder saying “This is a gift to the people who live and work in New York and those from around the world who come to visit our great art institutions.” That recognition–that the museum’s art is held in trust for the people of New York–is far too often forgotten or ignored by those who care more for the tender sensibilities of the Met’s ruling elite than they do for the rest of us. So thanks for the gift, Leonard. I’m just… Continue reading

The Times’ Real Estate section on Sunday will include a story on New York’s growing obsession with closets by Elissa Gootman. It seems I let slip the title of my new book, just completed, on Fifteen Central Park West. It’s…here. Continue reading

What do Ian Schrager, Gary Gensler and Susan Soros have in common? The apartment at the Majestic on Central Park West that I peek into in this month’s Unreal Estate column in Avenue Magazine. I lived in the building once, too, for a couple of weeks, and majestic is a pretty good word for it. Continue reading

In The Yale Review in 1920, Baltimore’s H.L. Mencken (at right) took on the notion of an American aristocracy, the utter failure of the plutocratic class to live up to any aristocratic ideal, and the role of the press in propping up the plutocracy. This passage is long, but well worth revisiting, as ninety-three years later, it’s both funny and frightening how much it still applies.

“The most salient characteristic of [a genuine aristocracy],” Mencken wrote, “is its interior security, and the chief visible evidence of that security is the freedom that goes with it–not only freedom in act, the divine right of the aristocrat to do what he jolly well pleases, so long as he does not violate the primary guarantees… Continue reading

Extell’s West 57th Street condo-hotel One57, home of Hurricane Sandy’s dangling boom of doom, has been an (un-)favorite of Gripepad’s since its damn-the-context design was first revealed. The Towering Infernal was in the news again yesterday, when London’s Telegraph revealed that the latest Chinese buyer in the building had gone into contract on a $6.5 million unit for a two-year old in anticipation of the child’s enrollment in college sixteen or so years from now. As I noted in Newsweek earlier this year, realty insiders have already nicknamed the building Chinatown. But with China’s new leadership cracking down on the gluttony of its ascendent upper class, some of whom are presumably stashing their money (as well as their… Continue reading

Institutions are run by individuals who sometimes fail to live up to what’s best about them. In an AP story making the rounds today about the latest class-action lawsuit accusing the leaders of the august Metropolitan Museum of Art of cowing and gouging visitors and violating the terms of its lease, MMA spokesman Harold Holzer (referred to as the Met’s Minister of Propaganda by one rogue curator) shows its administration’s thin skin when faced with insufficient reverence, calling the suit… Continue reading

I’m all ears in the photo accompanying my sister Jane’s article in tomorrow’s NY Times sports section on our father Milton Gross and our years skipping school to accompany him to spring training in St. Petersburg. But just to be clear, with all due respect to the late Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals (with whom we’re pictured), I was (and remain) a Yankees fan. And yes, that me and the Mick, but the rookie Mel Stottlemeyer was pitching batting practice that day, so he wouldn’t let me into the cage. Continue reading

Super stock picker Martin Zweig’s last interview before his death in February appeared in my Avenue Unreal Estate column in June 2012 about three ballrooms-turned-penthouses on the southern rim of Central Park. Today, Jennifer Gould Keil at the Post reports a rumor that his widow Barbara Zweig is about to list his Pierre Hotel penthouse for $120 million, which would be a record-setting price. When he bought it for $20 million in 1999, he told me, “I thought it was under-priced.” Let’s see how high the market will fly now. Continue reading

David Bowie’s return this week reminded me of the last lines of a profile I wrote long ago of his friend and collaborator Brian Eno, and a comment Eno made on his work with Bowie on the albums Low and Heroes. It’s applicable to just about any creative endeavor. “We’d go to the studio, work for hours on end, and then come back and find ourselves sitting in the kitchen at 6:00 AM too tired to make anything to eat,” Eno said. “What Bowie would do was tie a napkin ’round his throat and break a couple raw eggs into his mouth. I thought, ‘Fuck, this is really funny. If only this could go on the album cover.’ If only people could really see how workmanlike this life is in a way. It’s just going to work and doing things as best you… Continue reading