In a post-Christmas surge, Unreal Estate has vaulted back up to the #6 position on the Los Angeles Times non-fiction bestseller list.

There’s a snappy slide show of real-estate-listing photos of apartments now on sale at 740 Park on Business Insider today. There’s even a news hook for it–announced the day before–the listing of Vera Wang‘s fab duplex there. And since the item claims that I “run a blog about the building,” I figured I’d better link to show it’s still alive, even if my attention has moved elsewhere, to the west coast, for instance. But what the hey, I say. New babies tend to hog all the attention. Today’s the six-year-old’s turn. Proving there’s life in this not-quite-abandoned old blog yet.

“Otherwise Occupied,” my latest column for Crain’s New York Business, looks at bankers, Babbo, 740 Park Avenue (above) and Occupy Wall Street, and concludes: Let them eat Chef Boyardee.

….but Occupy Wall Street is currently en route to 740 Park, identified for their purposes as the home of David Koch. So what are Steve Schwarzman, John Thain, Ezra Merkin, Izzy Englander, David Ganek, Charles Stevenson, Steven Mnuchin, Thomas Tisch and Ronald Lauder–chopped liver?

I got a Google alert this morning pointing towards a HuffPo piece by an Occidental College professor named Peter Dreier that claims the 740 Park Avenue duplex owned by Steven and Heather Mnuchin (above) was sold for a measly $9 million two years ago when the Mnuchins moved to LA after Steven took over a bank there. Just for the record: not so. I doubt you could buy a closet at 740 for that price! The Mnuchins still own their place in the best little apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Curiously enough, Occidental College has a cameo role in Unreal Estate: Alphonzo Bell, the founder of Bel Air, one of the communities the book is about, was an Occidental graduate, trustee and benefactor.

The business pages at the New York Post think Ezra Merkin, a resident (above, right) of 740 Park, might be New York’s worst Blue Meanie. It seems he’s spent more fighting an arbitration award to a victim of the Bernie Madoff (above left) mess–he was one of Madoff’s big middlemen–than the size of the award itself. Ouch.

Elise Knutsen of the New York Observer reports that the paper has received a letter from Brown Harris Stevens,the management company for 740 Park Avenue, firmly denying a source’s contention last week that it or the building’s board had any knowledge that one of BHS’s owners, Kent Swig, had borrowed against his 740 apartment (now occuppied by his estranged wife, the former Elizabeth Macklowe). “The suggestion that Brown Harris Stevens would somehow violate the rules of a building it manages, and thus its fiduciary duties, in order to accommodate a principal is absolutely untrue and very damaging to Brown Harris Stevens’ nearly 140 year old sterling reputation,” the firm wrote, leaving no doubt it feels itself innocent. As the loan document above from August 1997 indicates, the rules of the building were violated, however, quite long ago, when 845 shares of the co-op corporation stock and the Swigs’ proprietary lease were pledged as collateral. So the mystery lingers. How did Swig manage to borrow against an apartment in the city’s premier all-cash building? Did the Board breach its duty? Did the banks that loaned to the Swigs neglect to get Board recognition agreements? Inquiring cooperators want to know!

A few months back a genius told me she was convinced that luxury real estate had run its course as a subject of fascination. So how come even the Daily Mail in London thinks the spurious tale of the possible foreclosure of Kent and Elizabeth Swig‘s apartment at 740 Park is big news? This story has legs, but will it stand? Stay tuned. Apparently, you won’t be alone.

Yesterday, The New York Observer named several 740 Park households that were hit by the headwinds of economic distress in recent years. Today, there’s the first new listing in a long time at the storied tower, and none of the Observered names are involved. Computer gaming mogul Gregory Fischbach and wife Linda, a former fashion magazine editrix, have listed the former Thelma Chrysler Foy jewelbox (above) on the 17th floor of the trophy building, according to the New York Post, which hints that it’s a so-called pocket listing–i.e. not in the broker database open to all, but held tightly by one realtor. Alas, that realtor goes unnamed so there’s no way to know if the price–$29 million–is right. If it is, it’s either a sign of very good times, or of over-optimism on the part of the sellers. The best apartment in the building, Steve Schwarzman‘s 34-room duplex with mezzanine, just below, sold for a tad more than that about a little over a decade, but it has almost four times as much room.

In today’s New York Observer, Elise Knutsen looks at 740 Park and some of the families there who’ve felt the effects of the Great Recession.