The Schwarzman Challenge
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 […]
Park Avenue on iTunes
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 […]
Applauding Lauder’s words as well as his deed
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 […]
Out of the closet: 15CPW book title
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.
Eye on LA on Unreal Estate
Good things are worth waiting for. Back in November 2011, when Unreal Estate was launched with a gala party at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, KABC’s “Eye on LA” filmed a piece on the book that finally aired–sixteen months later. Watch it here.
Isn’t it Majestic?
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.
Flashback: H. L. Mencken on America’s (God-awful) Aristocracy
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 […]
Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown
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 […]
Met Museum flak calls critics a “nuisance,” AP listens anyway
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 […]
Down memory lane to Miller Huggins Field
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 […]