Much Ado About River House
Having put itself back on the map this February, River House, the storied co-operative overlooking the East River, has been vigorous about keeping its name in the news throughout 2013. My second column on the building, revealing the story and the controversy behind its attempt to dispose of the premises of the equally august River […]
15 CPW book is “deliciously detailed and completely engaging.” –Booklist
The first review of House of Outrageous Fortune is out this month in Booklist, the American Library Association’s magazine. The book “looks beyond the list of notable tenants,” says the starred review, “to explore the changes in the architectural and social landscape of elite Manhattan….Drawing on interviews with real-estate titans and power brokers, Gross provides […]
Grande Damn! Vreeland lives.
The late Diana Vreeland’s grandson Alexander Vreeland and his wife Lisa Immordino have turned her legacy into a cottage industry. My review of their latest production, Memos: The Vogue Years, is in today’s New York Post books section.
Peter Kaplan, R.I.P.
Peter Kaplan, one of the greatest editors of our generation, died yesterday of cancer. We first met at the home of another, Clay Felker, for whom we’d both worked. Kaplan subsequently assigned me a story on 15 Central Park West that later grew into a book. He is thanked in the acknowledgements but now, will […]
Smart Alec (Baldwin, of course)
With Alec Baldwin much in the news again, it seems a good time to resurrect this 1997 chestnut, “The Candidate,” about the time sixteen years ago when he was thinking seriously about running for local office.
Lou Reed’s Berlin got at least one good review
Obituaries hailing Lou Reed in recent days have mentioned his disgust with rock critics who overwhelmingly disparaged his 1974 concept album Berlin. But one critic gave it a good review, me, writing for Crawdaddy while still a schoolboy. In Lou’s honor, I reprint it here. LOU REED IS the grand ghoul of them all. He […]
Amanda Vaill hails House of Outrageous Fortune
This just in: “Michael Gross’s House of Outrageous Fortune is a book about a building the way Moby Dick is a book about a fish. History, real-estate wheeling and dealing, the economics of the buccaneer class, the arcane realpolitik of condos and co-ops, even floor-plans: it’s all here. If you want to find out why […]
15CPW still NYC’s most expensive residence
A report released last week by Cityrealty (click to find the download link) on the city’s hundred priciest condominiums ranks Fifteen Central Park West as themost expensive, with re-sales of apartment averaging $5,847 per square foot in the year ending August 31. The biggest sale of the year was also in the building, the $29 […]
Leroy boy, is that you (again)?
Metal man Leroy Schechter (pictured), whose two adjacent sky-high units at 15 Fifteen Central Park West have been on and off the market (and in and out of the newspapers as his tenants played the old in-and-out in them) so often, both separately and together, it’s enough to make your listings spin, is back again, […]
More big money buzz on the Billionaire’s Belt
A moving truck is currently idling outside 200 Central Park South. Bernard Spitzer, father of you-know-who, who built the curved modernist apartment house in 1963 in conscious emulation of its catty-corner landmark terracotta neighbor Alwyn Court, is moving into unit 27A at 200 today, a source inside the building says. Spitzer sponsored the building’s 1984 […]