NEW YORK | 15 Central Park West - 35 (2 Towers) | (2) 550 FT / 168 M | (2) 35 FLOORS

[Swede]

Originally Posted by CoolCzech

It does fit right in. Let's hope great architecture like this leads to more high quality "retro" work in the future. I never understood why modernists traditionally insisted on a monopoly of new construction, badmouthing the use of more traditional styles.

Hear, hear! It is certainly possible to come up with new fresh designs even when using an old style.
/bored with the neo-functionalism that has ruled supreme in Stockholm for 15 years.

A beautiful building like this, with all the modern amenities and modern floorplans... sweeeeeet.

[Dac150]

The Time Warner Center gets my vote for Manhattan skyscraper of the decade.

[vaporvr6]

Originally Posted by Dac150

The Time Warner Center gets my vote for Manhattan skyscraper of the decade.

its up there.

[CoolCzech]

I think the Time Warner Center gets a bad rap. Maybe not a "masterpiece," but as a part of the entire Columbus Circle ensemble it's great.

[GVNY]

True, Time Warner is not as awful as many paint it to be, but those satellite cut-outs facing south sure are tacky.

Finally, 15 CPW is an example of fine architectural craftsmanship. As long as architects put effort into their designs and seek quality materials, superior skyscrapers can still be erected. Worth every billion...

[NYguy]

I think both the Time Warner Center and 15 CPW are well done, and both represent the building boom of the last decade. Even the Hearst tower is in there....

[CoolCzech]

city-journal.org

Architecture’s Battle of the Modernisms
. . . and what it means for Gotham’s future

The glowing limestone 15 Central Park West next to the acrid brown Trump International HotelIf you want to know what Gotham’s twenty-first-century skyscrapers ought to look like, go over to 15 Central Park West and gaze at the brilliant apartment building Robert A. M. Stern is just completing on the entire block from Central Park West to Broadway, between 61st and 62nd Streets. And while you’re there, stand on 62nd Street and look south between the structure’s two towers. In one glance, you’ll see the best that recent urban modernism has to offer—and the worst. It’s an instant object lesson in the right and the wrong ways to build the New York of the future.

Modernist architecture almost from the start had two chief strains. The one that produced Manhattan’s greatest icons, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, as well as Rockefeller Center, flows from Paris: from the classical massing, symmetry, and proportion that Gotham architects learned at the École des Beaux-Arts, and from the astonishing vocabulary of ornament that they learned from the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs that gave us the art deco style. The other current, the International Style, flowing from the Bauhaus art and design school founded in Germany in 1919, gave the world the glass and steel box, which arrived in New York at the start of the 1950s in the relatively refined forms of the UN Secretariat and Lever House on Park Avenue. For the next half-century, that style didn’t so much develop as degenerate, producing such creations as the Trump International Hotel at Columbus Circle, which we see to our left as we look south from 62nd Street.

This grandiosely named building is a fine example of what not to do.n fairness, developer Donald Trump began with an awful International Style edifice, the 1967 Gulf and Western Building, whose structural flaws caused it to sway enough to make visitors seasick. Trump’s rebuilding three decades later, by architect Philip Johnson, made the tower stop blowing in the wind, but in other respects it merely put lipstick on a pig. Johnson had promised a latter-day Seagram Building, International modernism’s mid-fifties holy of holies. But that Park Avenue shrine, the excitement of its newness long gone, looks good half a century later chiefly in relation to the thousands of mediocre or downright execrable imitations it spawned, right up to the Trump International Hotel.

The Seagram Building was soulless and antihumanist, not only in aspiring to be a stripped-down, undecorated “machine for living,” as if human beings did not always need to adorn their living with such transforming mystiques as marriage, manners, and art. It was soulless also in its implication that individuals are interchangeable units to shove into a bureaucratic grid of identical cubicles imposed on them from above. such austere elegance as the Seagram Building managed to achieve by covering its spare, almost anorexic frame with a grid of bronze mullions and by standing aloof in its chilly but expensive plaza vanished entirely in the imitations run up block after block by developers happy to rename cheapskate cost-cutting “minimalism” and “functionalism.” When Johnson sheathed the Trump International Hotel in bronze-colored glass, a smear of acrid brown against the sky, perhaps he really did produce the ne plus ultra of the International Style—pure Trumpery.

The International Style’s practitioners loved to issue manifestos proclaiming theirs the authentic architecture of the Machine Age. Turn your eye slightly to the right of the Trump International Hotel and you’ll see an up-to-the-minute example of the architecture of the Computer Age, Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower, completed a year ago at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street and seemingly conceived not by a human being but by state-of-the-art design software. Thanks to microchip power, the two-dimensional grid has evolved in the new millennium into a whole garden of abstract, rationalist three-dimensional shapes, from Lord Foster’s London City Hall, whose appearance of a stack of dishes teetering on the verge of tumbling down provides a perfect setting for Mayor Ken Livingstone, to his Swiss Re headquarters, also in London, which Londoners inevitably dubbed “the Crystal Phallus.”

Like the Phallus, the new hub of the Hearst publishing empire looks like a rocket ship that has invaded an unsuspecting metropolis, an impression heightened on 57th Street because the Thing from Outer Space seems to have chosen as a perfectly shaped landing pad the old, six-story International Magazine Building, out of whose limestone shell it rises. Formed of external, crisscrossing diagonal beams, like a scissor lift or a scissor jack for your car, the building ought to look as though it is straining upward toward the sky. But strangely, it looks instead as though it is transmitting its tremendous force not heavenward but downward into the earth, with such brute and resentful force that in time the ground will crack from river to river, and who knows what slimy alien creatures will slither out of the fissures.

Buildings once expressed some human value or aspiration—and I don’t mean just Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals that proclaimed the immanence of the sacred, but also structures like the old GE building on Lexington Avenue and 51st Street, with its riot of moderne decoration magnificently celebrating man’s mastery of electric power. By contrast, the Hearst Tower is as soulless as any International-Style edifice, and to make up for that defect, it has appropriated an artificial soul. Like a growing number of twenty-first-century buildings in the same plight, it declares itself a temple of ecology that treads lightly and reverently upon the earth, despite its oppressive—indeed, elephantine—footprint, despite the wholly manufactured appearance of its shiny stainless-steel exoskeleton and four-story-high glass scales, despite housing a corporation that gobbles up forests, and despite standing in a metropolis that is triumphantly a work of art, not nature. Nevertheless, though neither civilization nor capitalism has anything to apologize for in the use it makes of the earth, the building’s entrance proudly sports the seal of the U.S. Green Building Council, and the Hearst Corporation’s website coos about the building’s “environmental sustainability,” including its recycled steel (like most steel nowadays), its energy efficiency, and its “harvesting” of rainwater, which, among other wonders, bubbles down the atrium waterfall, “believed to be the nation’s largest sustainable water feature.”

Dominating the dramatically high and light-suffused atrium from the place of honor above the waterfall is Riverlines, Richard Long’s 50-foot-high . . . well, finger painting. I am not kidding. Long, noted for his artworks of stones laid out in circles, spirals, and lines, has scooped up mud from the banks of the Hudson and the Avon Rivers and smeared it all over the Hearst Corporation’s wall like a baby smearing his nursery walls with doo-doo. Dribbles of mud even remain where they dried on the wall below. This mural expresses, as a gracious and well-informed security guard told me, reverence for the earth—a bit too literally, perhaps, for my metropolitan taste. It expresses as well the truth of the dictum, ascribed to Chesterton, that in a secular age people don’t believe in nothing but in anything.

Worse than all this, the Hearst Tower is an act of vandalism, smashing as it does through the gutted shell of the old International Magazine Building, an art deco masterpiece by the extraordinary Vienna-born Joseph Urban, an architect of genius as well as a first-rate set designer and theater and opera director. The six stories finished in 1928 were to have at least seven more added to them, had the Depression not intervened. Though no plans for these survive, Urban’s dramatic, almost histrionic, urn-capped giant columns literally point the way upward. Imagine what a great architect and an enlightened municipal historic-preservation policy could have achieved merely by following Urban’s lead in a creative way.

Turning again to the right, we move from this grunting Caliban of a building to something more in graceful Ariel’s realm of the spirits: David Childs’s upward-aspiring 2004 Time Warner Center, on the western edge of Columbus Circle. Childs employs the International Style’s grammar to speak in art deco’s vocabulary, with a down-home New York accent. His structure is steel and glass, yes; but its form, with two soaring towers, echoes the much-loved twin-spired art deco apartment buildings that march northward up Central Park West: the Century, the Majestic, the San Remo, and the El Dorado, all built (like the Empire State Building) in 1930 and 1931.

Like these precursors, the Time Warner Center soars heavenward. Its two towers, crowned with glass crenellations like the masonry buttresses that top its art deco models, lighten the 69-story building’s huge bulk by dividing it in two, and draw the eye ever upward. Because of the building’s site, with Columbus Circle and Central Park to the east and mostly low-rise structures to the west, the gray-blue glass skin doesn’t reflect neighboring buildings but in effect holds a mirror up to nature. It’s a new Manhattan pleasure to drive down Fifth Avenue or up Tenth and watch the two towers change mood and color with the shifting clouds and sky. Their crowns, lit up at night, are the latest Gotham landmark.

The two towers echo but don’t ape their art deco forerunners, and it’s important to acknowledge what a marvel of city planning Childs has accomplished with them. His first problem was to close the vista looking west along Central Park South without blocking it. Voilà, the two spires perfectly frame the western sky. But even more difficult, Childs had to square the circle: to conform to the shape of Columbus Circle while also fitting the structure into the New York grid. He did this by making the towers parallelograms instead of squares (which further lightens their apparent bulk) and by building them with setbacks, rotating each segment away from the circle and into the square as they rise one upon another. This twisting strengthens the building’s impression of dynamic power, and it creates as well a series of planes and angles more interesting than those in a cubist painting because they are necessary rather than arbitrary.

If only the base along Columbus Circle weren’t so banal, and the atrium, lined by four stories of shops, didn’t resemble a suburban shopping mall that seems more Manhasset than Manhattan! If only the interior finishes weren’t so tacky and the ceilings so cheeseparingly low, even in the so-called Grand Ballroom of the hotel that takes up part of the building! Nevertheless, to get so many things right in what is in effect a little city, with apartments, a corporate headquarters, fancy restaurants, a concert hall, and a supermarket in addition to the hotel and the shops, is a gift and a wonder—and a happy start for the new millennium.

If Norman Foster brushed aside New York’s distinctive modernist heritage and David Childs embraced it in part, Robert Stern has mobilized all its resources to produce a great building that is utterly of our own time while evoking our nostalgic love for the greatness of the past—not of Greece or Rome but the ideal past of our own city as embodied by the suave urbanity of Cole Porter or Fred Astaire and the glamour of the Stork Club or the Rainbow Room. At 15 Central Park West, we are not in Kansas any more—and not in Houston either. This is Gotham.

Perhaps inspired by the full-block Waldorf-Astoria, Stern has divided his vast structure into a 20-story part consistent in height with its Central Park West neighbors and a 43-story tower on the Broadway side of the site, all sheathed sumptuously in limestone from the same quarry that provided the Empire State Building’s stone. The 40-foot-wide space between the two sections gives every major room in the building plenty of light and air, and Stern’s inventiveness turns this ample plot of ground into an amenity. A stone passage, centering on a copper-topped pergola, connects the building’s two sections and divides this space in half. To the north lies a garden with a reflecting pool that serves as a skylight for the swimming pool below; to the south, a gated cour d’honneur with a central fountain, similar to the swanky car entry to the River House on 52nd Street, will let visitors know that they’re arriving somewhere special and exclusive even before they walk through the door at the center of the pergola.

In this part of town, Broadway runs on a diagonal to the city grid, and in a subtly urbane city-planning gesture Stern has aligned the tower on the Broadway side of the site with the grid rather than the street. An asymmetrical five-story section of shops, their show windows framed in exquisitely detailed bronze—real, heavy bronze, not Trumpery—fans out from the grid and carries the structure out to Broadway, turning this entire block into a graceful pivot pointing the way from midtown to the Upper West Side.

Part of this building’s fun lies in recognizing its quotes from some of Manhattan’s grandest and most romantic art deco buildings. The elegant neo-baroque shape of the dramatically molded Central Park West door and the Broadway shop windows, for instance, is pure River House, a 1931 building that, before the FDR Drive intervened, boasted a private dock for Harold S. Vanderbilt and other resident yachtsmen. Ditto the stacks of bow windows that impel the eye up to the top of several of Stern’s facades, and the pilasters on the south side, which echo not just the River House but also the doorways of the Empire State Building and John D. Rockefeller’s 740 Park Avenue, as well as the International Magazine Building’s unforgettable columns. Beneath the windows overlooking the park are scalloped decorative panels that invoke the devices that Emery Roth and Irwin Chanin used on their art deco apartments to the north. No one is better at playing this game of spot-the-quote than Stern, dean of the Yale architecture school and lead author of an indispensable five-volume, 5,407-page catalog of New York buildings from 1880 to the present.

Like the great art deco buildings, this one rewards you, as it leads your eye upward through a subtly varied development of windows and embellishments, with something worth seeing. The climax is not a crown but a flamboyant colonnade flanked by a console-shaped buttress and a three-story-high apse, like the bridge of an ocean liner, reminiscent of the colonnaded, bow-windowed crest of 10 Gracie Square and of Rosario Candela’s famous roofline at 1040 Fifth Avenue, once home to Jacqueline Onassis. It’s the ultimate stage set in New York’s theater of ambition. On the terraces of this empyrean realm, one imagines, tycoons in dinner jackets will clink martini glasses with slim girls shimmering in silk and Shalimar, to the tune of Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top.”

This is, to be sure, the architecture of plutocracy. Only moguls like Sandy Weill and Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein or celebrities like Denzel Washington and Sting can afford price tags up to $45 million for such stylish opulence, including a monumental, half-block-long lobby with wine-dark marble door frames and columns, and enormous, classically laid-out apartments whose lofty, light-flooded rooms cry out to be filled with party guests and children. Part of this building’s importance is that enough such buyers want to live in New York again (and on the West Side, at that) to support so ambitious a venture, after decades of decline that began in the Depression, when the Hampshire House stood unfinished and boarded up for five years and when the Alwyn Court, its mortgage foreclosed, cut up its 22 grand apartments into 75 modest ones. Not only do the mega-rich who paid over $2 billion for these 201 new condos want to live in Gotham; they also want to participate in its spectacle. Hence the almost floor-to-ceiling windows, up to 16 feet wide, that look out on the gorgeous panorama of Central Park, which few residents will know was once a dangerous dustbowl, until Mayor Giuliani cleared up its crime and private philanthropy restored its heart-melting magnificence. Few will know that they are part of Gotham’s new golden age—long may it endure.

Famed architecture critic Vincent Scully once asked City Journal readers (Autumn 1994) to consider how much they would like the Guggenheim Museum if it stood in a street of similar structures. Does not the power of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece depend in part on the civility of the urban fabric in which it stands? he asked. Would not several Guggenheims turn the street into a strip? As New York builds again, we should think hard about whether we really want a city of Hearst Towers—or even of Time Warner Centers, which would look very different in a glass-towered city. When another Norman Foster Thing from Outer Space rises 78 stories high on the World Trade Center site, along with the other Houston-style monsters now on the drawing boards of architects loved only by Gotham’s planning mandarins and the almost infallibly wrong Pritzker Prize committee, New Yorkers are likely to respond with a universal Bronx cheer. And if the proposals for redeveloping the Far West Side in a similar style come to fruition, Gotham will cease to be a metropolis primarily of stone skyscrapers in the classical Beaux-Arts and art deco styles and will become a city of glass behemoths that could be anywhere.

For myself, I’ll take Manhattan.

***************************

I guess she's not a fan of International and Post-Modern style

[CGII]

Originally Posted by CoolCzech

The Seagram Building was soulless and antihumanist, not only in aspiring to be a stripped-down, undecorated “machine for living,” as if human beings did not always need to adorn their living with such transforming mystiques as marriage, manners, and art. It was soulless also in its implication that individuals are interchangeable units to shove into a bureaucratic grid of identical cubicles imposed on them from above. such austere elegance as the Seagram Building managed to achieve by covering its spare, almost anorexic frame with a grid of bronze mullions and by standing aloof in its chilly but expensive plaza vanished entirely in the imitations run up block after block by developers happy to rename cheapskate cost-cutting “minimalism” and “functionalism.” When Johnson sheathed the Trump International Hotel in bronze-colored glass, a smear of acrid brown against the sky, perhaps he really did produce the ne plus ultra of the International Style—pure Trumpery.

Positvely foolish. I don't even know where to begin with this one.

[NYguy]

Yeah, 15 CPW is great, but I love the Seagram also. Different styles, different buildings. It's foolish to compare a residential tower with a commercial one anyway.

[NYguy]

http://ny.therealdeal.com/articles/a...look-at-15-cpw

A unit-by-unit look at 15 CPW
Who's who at posh condo, from A to the Zeckendorfs



By Lauren Elkies and Catherine Contiguglia
March 2008


The list of buyers reads like a veritable who's who of business, finance, entertainment and other industries, including actor Denzel Washington, NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon, musician/yoga practitioner Sting, director Norman Lear, the Zeckendorf brothers and numerous financial bigwigs.

The Real Deal set out this month to detail a unit-by-unit breakdown in Manhattan's much-heralded newly constructed condo project, 15 Central Park West.

All of the 202 units at the limestone behemoth overlooking Central Park have been purchased, and about half the sales had closed as of late last month, according to Gregory Heym, executive vice president at Terra Holdings, parent company of Brown Harris Stevens, the building's managing agent. Around 80 sales have been recorded with the city so far.

Prices in the neoclassical two-wing development (the House building is 20 stories, and the Tower is 43) developed by Arthur and William Zeckendorf and designed by Robert A.M. Stern have ranged from $690,000 for a staff apartment to over $40 million. The whole project sold out for around $2 billion.

Most recently at the upper end, hedge fund manager Daniel S. Loeb closed on penthouse 39 for $45 million, city records show.

"15 CPW is a development that is on a completely different level than most," said Jessica Armstead, a vice president at the Corcoran Group. "While the location is the primary reason for the premium, the services provided are a close second. 15 CPW is not only selling the location, it is selling a lifestyle."

Some of the unusual amenities provided in the 57,900-square-foot building bound by 61st and 62nd streets, Central Park West and Broadway include a private dining room for 60 guests, a professional kitchen with a full-time private chef, 29 guest or staff suites/home offices and temperature-controlled wine cellars.

Many buyers cited the location as the primary reason for their purchase.

The Corcoran Group's Robby Browne said he spent $2.7 million to purchase apartment 6J in the building, down the block from where he currently lives, "because I love the location. There's no other building like it in the city."

Halstead Property senior vice president Dorothy Somekh bought unit 7J for $2.5 million for similar reasons. Buyers who don't want to live in a glass curtain wall building have been attracted to Stern's style — getting the benefit of a prewar-style building without prewar construction maintenance problems.

"The building has all the conveniences you could want, and it's built like a prewar building with all the modern amenities. It's a very gracious building," Somekh said.

Stern has been commissioned for several other projects around town, including three by the Related Companies — the Brompton, Superior Ink and the Harrison.

Buying in 15 Central Park West is already proving to be a sound investment, with some buyers doubling their money at resale.

Evan Cole, the co-founder of ABC Carpet & Home, is reportedly selling his 15th-floor apartment for over $9 million after paying $4.8 million for the 2,520-square-foot condo on Dec. 19, 2007.

In another resale, unit 29C, a 2,761-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath on the park, is in contract for close to $14 million, said Doug Russell, a managing director at Brown Harris Stevens and the unit's co-listing broker. The asking price was $12.5 million.

The original buyer paid around $7.3 million for the apartment, Russell said, and planned to use it as a primary residence until health issues prompted the resale.

Warren A. Estis, a partner at the Rosenberg & Estis law firm, bought apartment 26C for $7 million early in the sales cycle (although the unit closed on Jan. 11, 2008).

"At the time it might have seemed expensive, but obviously there's a tremendous value there, and I believe there's been a significant appreciation," Estis said.

The building's closings began in August 2007, with the greatest bulk occurring in December. A particularly large number of Goldman Sachs employees bought in the building; at least seven had made it into the public record as of late February, including chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Whitehall Street Real Estate Funds, part of Goldman Sachs, co-owns the building with Zeckendorf Development.

Buyers have been moving in, albeit slowly, since late last year.

Raj Sethi, a vice president for commodities derivatives trading at Goldman Sachs, bought apartment 15L for $4.1 million in December. He moved in that month.

"There are not too many people living there right now," Sethi said.

Kyle Warner Blackmon, an associate broker at Brown Harris Stevens who has sold a penthouse unit in the building, said 32 of the 202 units were occupied as of Feb. 29. He said, however, that it doesn't feel like a "ghost town" in the building.

"If you stand outside, you see people coming in and out of the building consistently," said Blackmon, also a vice president. But, he conceded, "I'm sure it gets a little quieter at night."

Zeckendorf Development declined to comment on any aspect of the project.

The Real Deal used in-house research and city data, compiled by PropertyShark.com, to uncover who bought which unit. However, of the approximately 80 buyers in the public record, some owners were hard to identify because they purchased their units under LLCs.

The buyers of the other 122 units were unknown because their sales had not yet closed, or the sales had not yet been filed with the city. Many of the reported celebrity buyers, including Denzel Washington, Sting, Norman Lear and the Zeckendorf brothers, fell into one of the unidentifiable categories.

Following is a look at the roster of known major buyers in the building by floor, including the buyers' names, unit square footage, number of bedrooms, purchase price and closing date. Prices generally don't include transfer tax.

_____________________________


3B: Insurance firm AIG COO Rodney O. Martin bought the 3,142-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath unit on December 3, 2007, for $8.1 million.

3E: Christina Bloom, who appears to be a managing partner at Manhattan Films, bought the 2,135-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit on November 2, 2007, for $5 million.

3F: Corbett A. Price, chairman and CEO of Kurron Shares of America, a management, consulting and strategic advisory company specializing in the health care industry, shelled out $4.9 million on January 22, 2008, for the 1,987-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath apartment.

4D: Thomas A. Wagner, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, and Cynthia A. Wagner purchased the 3,333-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath apartment for $9.8 million on November 28, 2007.

4F: Meg Siegler Callahan, vice president of development at Hubbard Street Dance Company in Chicago, bought the 1,987-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit on January 8, 2008, for $5 million.

5D: John E. Waldron, a Goldman Sachs managing director, bought the 3,332-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath apartment for $8.7 million on December 13, 2007. Goldman transferred Waldron, who had been co-head of leverage finance, from New York to London, to co-head its European financial sponsors group.

5E: A husband and wife bought the 2,136-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit. Fong Chi and Zhen Zhong Li purchased the apartment November 15, 2007, for $5 million.

6E: Antonio José Louçã Pargana, president of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in Brazil, bought the 2,136-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit for $5.2 million, on November 12, 2007.

6H: Citigroup Chairman Emeritus Sanford Weill and wife Joan Weill purchased the 1,084-square-foot apartment with a 100-square-foot terrace on October 15, 2007, for $950,000. The apartment has one bedroom and one-and-a-half bathrooms and is comprised of 1,084 square feet. [They also bought PH20.]

6J: A top real estate broker, Robby Browne, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group, paid $2.7 million on November 16, 2007, for the 1,477-square-foot, two-bedroom and two-and-a-half-bath unit with a 209-square-foot terrace. He said he has rented it out for a year and plans to move in at the end of the year.

6L: Dr. Shakeel Ahmed and his wife, Shaheen Mansoor, bought the 1,369-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath unit on November 29, 2007, for $2.4 million.

6M: Bruce Richbourg, who appears to be the president of the now-defunct Richbourg Rentals and Sales, which was recently purchased by Neff Corporation, paid $3.1 million on November 5, 2007, for the 1,540-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath apartment.

7C: Carolina Real Property LLC is listed as the buyer of the 3,444-square-foot unit with three bedrooms and four bathrooms on August 15, 2007, for $9.5 million. The buyer is reportedly NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon.

7D: Arthur S. Estey and wife Evelyne B. Estey bought the four-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath apartment on November 14, 2007, for $16.9 million. He works at Lehman Brothers. At 4,589 square feet, apartment 7D is one of the largest non-penthouse units in the building. [The couple also purchased unit S708.]

7H: Keiko Ibi, the Tokyo-born director and producer who won an Oscar in the short subject category for the HBO-produced documentary, "The Personals: Improvisations on Romance in the Golden Years," bought the 1,084-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath unit on November 19, 2007, for $1.8 million.

7J: Halstead Property senior vice president Dorothy Somekh bought the 1,477-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit with partner Ralph Kier for $2.5 million on November 1, 2007.

7L: Mikhail Tsinberg, who appears to be the founder and president of Key Digital, bought the 1,369-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath unit on November 5, 2007, for $2.5 million.

8B: Victory East LLC bought the unit for $10.8 million on December 21, 2007. The apartment is a 3,480-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath apartment.

8C: Sportscaster Bob Costas and wife Jill Sutton Costas bought the 3,444-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath unit for $10.8 million on November 20, 2007.

8D: Biltong US Trust bought the four-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath apartment for $13.9 million on November 20, 2007. At 4,589 square feet, apartment 8D is one of the largest non-penthouse units in the building.

8G: Jeanne Jermyn purchased the 1,756-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath apartment for $3.6 million on November 20, 2007. Her husband Brian Jermyn, who was not listed on the deed, is an account executive at Curtis Packaging.

8J: Catherine Guest bought the unit on November 7, 2007, for $2.8 million. The apartment has two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms and totals 1,477 square feet.

8K: Robert D. Frank bought the 1,034-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath apartment on November 29, 2007, for $2.5 million.

9C: Gillian Sorensen, senior advisor at the United Nations Foundation, purchased the 3,444-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bath unit for $10.8 million on November 9, 2007. She served as assistant secretary general for external relations at the United Nations under former Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Her husband, Ted Sorensen, was special counsel, advisor and primary speech writer for President John F. Kennedy.

9D: Ashok Varadhan and wife Margaret L. Varadhan bought the four-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath unit on December 3, 2007. Varadhan, who bought the condo for $16 million, is a Goldman Sachs partner who is considered one of Wall Street's best young traders. At 4,589 square feet, apartment 9D is one of the largest non-penthouse units in the building.

10B: Abigail S. Wexner, philanthropist and wife of the founder of women's apparel chain the Limited Stores, bought the apartment on January 25, 2008, for $13.1 million. Wexner, a former Wall Street attorney, and husband Leslie were the founding benefactors of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. The apartment is 3,480 square feet and has four bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms.

10K: George B. Irish, president of Hearst Newspapers and a senior vice president of Hearst Corporation, bought the apartment on December 3, 2007, for $5.8 million, along with Jean F. Wetherill. Irish serves on the boards of the Associated Press and the Newspaper Association of America. The three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath apartment is comprised of 2,520 square feet.

10L: Nahum Guzik, a technology magnate born in Russia, bought the 1,918-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit for $4.1 million on November 30, 2007.

11D: A trust in the name of William Kourakos, a former Morgan Stanley executive, purchased the unit on December 11, 2007, for $15 million. Kourakos is a partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a privately owned investment bank founded in 2006 that poached several stars from Morgan Stanley. From 1997 to 2004, Kourakos was Morgan Stanley's global head of leveraged finance. At 4,589 square feet, 11D is one of the largest non-penthouse units. The apartment has four bedrooms and five-and-a-half bathrooms and is also one of the larger overall units in the entire building.

11K: Alex Klein bought the 2,520-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath unit on December 3, 2007, for $5.1 million.

11L: Joel and Sherry L. Cherwin bought the 1,925-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath apartment for $3.6 million on November 19, 2007. Joel is a lawyer in St. Chestnut Hill, Mass.

12A: On February 13, 2008, Bruce Richards, CEO and president of Marathon Asset Management, purchased the unit for $19.36 million. Richards founded Marathon in 1998 after working as a managing director at Smith Barney. Also listed on the deed was Avis Richards, founder and president of Birds Nest Productions, a visual media production company. The apartment is 4,151 square feet and has a 267-square-foot terrace. There are four bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms.

12C: Richard Cantor, a Wall Street executive, and wife Pamela Cantor purchased the 3,338-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bath apartment on December 6, 2007, for $14 million. The unit has an 80-square-foot terrace.

12K: Derek Cribbs, a partner at Glenview Capital Management, purchased the 2,520-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath unit for $5.734 million on December 6, 2007.

14D: Jeffrey C. Walker, chairman of CCMP Capital Advisors, and his wife, Suzanne Walker, bought the 4,170-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath apartment for $21 million on December 14, 2007. Walker is a former managing partner of JPMorgan Partners.

14K: Michael Holtz, a real estate investor and the owner of a luxury travel company called Smart Flyer, closed on the 2,520-square-foot, three-bedroom and three-and-a-half-bath unit on December 11, 2007, for $4.8 million.

15D: Raymond Mikulich, co-head of Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners and one of the firm's managing directors, bought the 4,170-square-foot, four-bedroom and four-and-a-half-bath unit on February 5, 2008, for $17.9 million.

15J: On December 14, 2007, Sun Mi Lee and Sangeun Lee paid $2.1 million for the 1,312-square-foot, one-bedroom, two-bath apartment.

15K: The three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath unit was purchased by Evan Cole, co-founder of New York-based ABC Carpet & Home. He paid $4.8 million for the 2,520-square-foot condo on December 19, 2007. He reportedly put the unit back on the market and is selling it for over $9 million.

15L: Raj Sethi, a vice president for commodities derivatives trading at Goldman Sachs, paid $4.1 million on December 17, 2008, for the 1,913-square-foot unit with two bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms.

16-17A: Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein and wife Laura Blankfein bought the penthouse duplex for $26 million on January 10, 2008. Blankfein has been credited with re-directing Goldman away from some types of damaging investments that have hurt other investment banks as part of the subprime fallout. Fortune magazine ranked him No. 3 on its list of the most powerful people in business. The condo is comprised of 6,136 square feet of indoor space and 1,128 square feet of terrace space. The apartment has four bedrooms and six-and-a-half bathrooms.

24C: David Bizer, a London-based investment banker with Lehman Brothers, paid $5.3 million for the condo on December 10, 2007. Bizer is Lehman's head of European fixed income sales. Apartment 24C is a two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit totaling 1,745 square feet.

24D: Steven L. Hoffman, a Millennium Partners partner, and wife Terri Hoffman bought the 2,439-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath unit for $5 million on December 12, 2007. Hoffman analyzes potential acquisitions, arranges financing and negotiates leases and joint venture agreements.

25C: Eliahu Zahavi and wife Gabriela bought the 1,745-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit for $4.2 million on December 10, 2007.

26C: The $7 million apartment was purchased by Warren A. Estis, a partner at Rosenberg & Estis law firm, on January 11, 2008. It is 2,761 square feet and has three bedrooms and three-and-a-half bathrooms.

26D: Alan A. Shuch, a director of the Goldman Sachs Fund and a Goldman Sachs advisory director, and Leslie Wohlman Himmel, a partner at real estate investment firm Himmel + Meringoff Properties, bought the unit for $8.5 million on January 4, 2008. Crain's New York Business ranked her as one of the "100 Most Influential Women in Business." Apartment 26D is 3,176 square feet and has three bedrooms and four bathrooms.

28C: Alex Li Guodong purchased the 2,761-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath unit for $6.8 million on December 17, 2008.

28D: Toms River, N.J., cardiologist Kock-Yen Tsang bought the 3,176-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bath apartment on January 11, 2008, for $8.8 million.

31D: George Logothetis, manager of technology firm Accenture, bought the 3,176-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bath unit for $12.7 million on January 7, 2008.

32D: Anne M. White bought the 3,176-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bath unit for $13 million on January 17, 2008.

33C: The 2,761-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath apartment was purchased by William Moran on January 14, 2008, for $10 million.

33D: Zachary Jared Schreiber, a managing director at Duquesne Capital Management, and wife Lori Fisher Schreiber bought the 3,176-square-foot unit for $11 million on January 14, 2008. The apartment has three bedrooms and four bathrooms.

34C: Alexander Mikhailov paid $7.9 million on January 16, 2008, for the 2,761-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath apartment.

34D: Southfork Holdings purchased the 3,176-square-foot, three-bedroom and four-bath apartment for $10.5 million on January 16, 2008. [Also the buyer of S702]

35C: Michael Lewis bought the 2,761-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath apartment for $9.9 million on February 6, 2008. He is the global markets head of commodities research at Deutsche Bank London.

35D: Donald C. Opatrny, a partner at Goldman Sachs, bought the 3,176-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bath unit on January 10, 2008, for $11.6 million.

36C: Yerim Sow, a Senegalese telecom magnate, bought the apartment for $10.3 million. Sow, who closed on February 12, 2008, owns Teylium Telecom, a West African GSM mobile holding company. The apartment is 2,761 square feet with three bedrooms and three-and-a-half bathrooms.

36D: Political cartoonist Ranan Lurie and his wife Tamar Lurie, a sales associate in the Greenwich, Conn., office of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, closed on the 3,176-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bath unit on February 6, 2008, for $11.2 million.

37D: George F. Meng, managing director of Chinese import-export company Pacific American, purchased the apartment for $12.1 million. The apartment is 3,176 square feet with three bedrooms and four bathrooms. Meng was one of the last survivors to evacuate the World Trade Center on 9/11. Meng, one of the tower's early buyers, closed on his unit on October 14, 2005.

PH20: Citigroup chairman emeritus Sanford Weill and wife Joan Weill plunked down $42.4 million for the four-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bath unit on August 31, 2007. The apartment has 6,744 square feet of indoor space and 2,077 of exterior space, the largest terrace in the building. [They also bought unit 6H.]

PH39: The penthouse unit closed for $45 million. The buyer was listed on the deed as Panorama on the Park LLC. The unit is apparently the 10,674-square-foot, five-bedroom condo bought by hedge fund manager Daniel S. Loeb. The unit has five full bathrooms, two half-baths and a 709-square-foot terrace. Loeb reportedly signed an early contract to combine two units back in the fall of 2005. As founder and head of the Third Point hedge fund, Loeb is known for writing letters to companies he invests in that call for the firing of the CEOs.

S702: A 370-square-foot studio was purchased by Southfork Holdings for $690,000 on January 16, 2008, the least expensive unit purchased as of last month. [Also the buyer of 34D]

S708: Evelyne Estey and husband Arthur S. Estey bought the 448-square-foot studio for $870,000 on November 30, 2007. Arthur is reportedly a managing director at Lehman Brothers. [The couple also purchased unit 7D.]

S803: Boereworks US Trust purchased the 378-square-foot studio on November 20, 2007, for $722,957.

Multi-level retail space along Broadway: In October 2007, Best Buy took a $75 million, 15-year lease for 46,000 square feet. The retailer has ground-level and below-grade space.

Additional research by Ronit Socoloff.
Additional reporting by TRD.
City data compiled by PropertyShark.com for TRD.
Date represents when apartment closed.

[America 117]

its a very nice art deco building
it really fits in NY

[Scruffy]

wow. thats kind of shady that all their names get posted with the address and apt #

[Dac150]

Originally Posted by Scruffy

wow. thats kind of shady that all their names get posted with the address and apt #

Trust me, they want people to know how much they're spending for these apartments. It's all part of the New York City High Society game.

[Fabb]

[vandelay]

The interesting crown on the tower section of 15 CPW looks very reminiscent of 10 Gracie Square:


http://www.thecityreview.com/ues/eeave/10gracie.html