River House Revolution: Take that, Dr. Kissinger!
“Henry’s Hideaway” is the provocative title of my latest Unreal Estate column for Avenue, on the famously secretive River House cooperative on 52nd Street at the East River. Yes, it’s the home of stuffed shirts like Henry Kissinger, but some of what you know about it is wrong, and as the column reveals, a lot […]
Ed Koch, RIP
Ed Koch, New York’s most colorful modern mayor, died this morning. My favorite memory of him is our interview for Rogues’ Gallery, the story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Koch had long disdained the place as a clubhouse for its wealthy and arrogant patrons and greatly enjoyed winning several battles against the museum’s board. […]
Whale Watching
Students and fellow realty obsessives, Curbed LA gives a history lesson on the first realty whales to hit Los Angeles this week and Unreal Estate is one of the assigned texts.
Bonfire of the Verities: LIBOR’s Bob Diamond’s hideout revealed and other tales of unreal realty
Where’s Barclay’s banker-in-chief Robert “Bob” Diamond been since leaving Barclays in disgrace amidst a rate-fixing scandal last summer? Licking his wounds (and counting his millions) right in our midst in a modest $37 million penthouse at Fifteen Central Park West. Read that and other tales of high-end apartment insanity in Manhattan–and of the people who […]
Uncommon Coinage: The Billionaires’ Belt
A while back, while guest-editing Curbed New York, I tried to give a nickname to the midtown neighborhood I’d moved to, and earned a flaming from the site’s ardent comment trolls. Today, in the New York Observer, Matt Chaban gives me a second chance, letting me dub 57th Street The Billionaire’s Belt, in a story […]
Beachy Keen in Palm Beach
Maurice Fatio was one of the architects who defined the luxe eclectic look of Palm Beach. In the January issue of Avenue, my latest Unreal Estate column looks at the home he built for his future mother-in-law, a thoroughly unconventional Tudor-by-the-shore on Lake Worth. Is it worth its asking price of $24.9 million? Only the […]
Trophy Buildings Then and Now
To each his own. Trophy building, that is. The Real Deal’s Jane Timm and Candace Taylor look at several of the city’s finest residences, then, now and, it predicts, in days to come, in this story on what it calls It Buildings. Two are the subjects of books by this blogger: Then, it was 740 […]
#printnotdead…yet
Do you have to be Belgian to still love print? Happy holidays from one still proudly ink-stained wretch.
“A romping account…hidden and hushed up stories of alluring lives…” –HUSK Magazine
The new issue of the bi-annual fashion magazine Husk has an interview with me by Eugenia Lapteva and a lengthy and irreverent guide to the residents of 740 Park (and some gate-crashers, too). I told Husk that 15 Central Park West is the new black, but apparently they still hanker for old school East Side […]
Diplomatic Wintour
Anna Wintour a diplomat? That’s the subject of Jane Ridley‘s feature in today’s New York Post, in which I’m quoted recalling my favorite tale of Wintour’s wrath–the night the Rogues’ Gallery cover girl gave the deep freeze treatment to Giorgio Armani.