Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
By now, Montauk’s identity as a working-class fishing village has, like its beaches, largely eroded, between Surf Lodge and Gurney’s and trailers selling for $3.75 million. But the dome home at 54 East Lake Drive, built by a local handyman in 1976, is a vestige of an earlier era in the town’s history. With shingled sides and extensive interior wood detailing, it’s also a particularly well-preserved example of the DIY building craze that swept the country in the late ’60s and ’70s among hippie and back-to-the-land types. But the house, which just listed with Kevin Iglesias and Sarah Fox from Signature Premier Properties, is asking the very 2024 price of $2.99 million.
The dining area — domes are known for their large, open spaces.
Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
“He wasn’t a builder, but he had a vision,” says Iglesias of the late owner, Eugene Tallarico, whose son is selling the property. “He always had a liking of the dome shape and he wanted to do something architectural.” It’s one of the few domes on the East End, as far as Iglesias knows, and there is another dome home, an exceptionally large one, on the North Fork. His son Euguene Thomas Tallarico says that his father worked on the home while living in Greenwich Village and working as a purser for TWA. Whenever he had time off, he’d come to Montauk and camp out at the building site. He was an inventive person, according to his son, who installed unusual features in the home like a built-in vacuum system. “It was a unique adventure,” he says. “And I want someone to carry on his inspiration.”
Dome homes, popularized by Steve Baer’s 1968 Dome Cookbook, which detailed how to frame one out yourself with two-by-fours or PVC pipes, were based on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic-dome design from 1954. (“You don’t need to know much, you just have to go ahead and try it out,” the book advised, although it appears you did need to know some trigonometry.) Part of the beauty of the dome fad was the notion that one need not be a professional, or spend a lot of money, to build a house. (A big focus of the movement was on reusing materials, such as steel from junked cars or bottle caps, as external coverings for the homes, not all of which survived the decades well.) The house at 54 East Lake Drive, however, was clearly built by a skilled craftsperson with an artistic eye. (Tallarico also painted, says Iglesias, and his paintings are still displayed throughout the home.) There are customized wood and stone floors, huge triangular windows that let in copious amounts of light, and cathedral ceilings in addition to three bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths, and a sprawling, curving kitchen. In all, the house is about 2,000 square feet.
The house isn’t on a huge amount of land, but it isn’t far from the water, and you can see the sound, and Connecticut, from the windows in the aerie at the top, a cupola with 360-degree views, according to Iglesias. It’s also relatively secluded, at the end of a very quiet, dead-end street about a five-minute drive from the village. All of which might help save it from demolition, a fate that’s befallen a number of other unusual, architecturally significant homes in the Hamptons. But given the current Montauk buyers’ market and the limited appeal of dome living — the homes, like octagon houses before them are, though inventive and often beautiful, not to everyone’s tastes — its survival isn’t a given, either. “It would be a shame to tear it down,” says Iglesias. “It’s a unicorn in Montauk. You can’t find another house like it.”
The home has high, dramatic ceilings with triangular windows.
Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
The kitchen is unusually spacious.
Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
The longtime owner added many custom elements and finishes to his home.
Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
One of the bathrooms.
Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
The dome has great views from the many large windows.
Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
The aerie has 360-degree views.
Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
The builder was a local handyman who also painted.
Photo: EPM Real Estate Photography
Alt sitting in her newest listing at 118 West 12th Street.
Photo: Dina Litovsky
The parlor of 118 West 12th Street has three ornate, golden floor-to-ceiling mirrors, each 12 feet high. The dark mahogany floors are immaculate, and the white couch and bone-colored carpet are sophisticated without being stuffy. It’s minimal and elegant, and you can imagine a real, almost certainly hot, and very fancy person living here — putting flowers in the handmade ceramic pitcher on the marble side table or paging through the Chanel coffee-table book but never spilling the coffee. It is Age of Innocence meets Architectural Digest, a turnkey fantasy curated by Eva Alt, who, now into her third year in the business, is managing the impossible: making it cool to be a New York real-estate agent.
“There are a lot of preconceived notions about what real-estate agents and what brokers look like,” Alt says as we wait for a client at the five-bedroom, five-bath rowhouse just off Sixth Avenue, her newest listing. “They’re cheesy, tacky, gimmicky … It’s older society ladies uptown, or it’s the guys on the TV shows, the flashy ones.” Alt is an agent with Compass’s Hudson Advisory team, which specializes in referral-only listings across the chicest belt of downtown Manhattan: Greenwich Village, the West Village, Soho, Noho, Nolita, Tribeca. If Alt lights a candle at a showing, it will be Diptyque’s Tuberose or Frederic Malle’s Jurassic Flower. No cookies will be baked.
In a city of 30,000 agents, Alt’s edge is her taste. None of her listings are new builds, with their soulless kitchens and AI staging. “A developer comes in and says, ‘We want to do this for the lowest price per square foot possible.’ It’s everywhere,” she says. The world of Prewar Eva, the Instagram account she uses to tease new listings, is artists’ lofts, merchants’ mansions, carriage houses, duplexes and triplexes with unique little nooks and details like a stained-glass window or original beams. They are obscenely expensive but also so special that the prices feel somehow inoffensive — almost.
What makes a Prewar Eva listing? Beaux-Arts is her favorite time period, but she’d take the house we’re currently touring, which is Neoclassical and recently owned by Roy Lichtenstein’s son and, before him, Jackson Pollock’s nephew. (The property is still technically pre-market, but last sold for $18 million.) Once the client, who works in private equity and asked to remain anonymous, arrives, Alt calls our attention to every detail: the Venetian plaster, an original 1847 sink in the upstairs bathroom (some of the oldest plumbing in the city), the Zuber wallpaper on the garden level, a skylight on the third floor that casts the house in a certain glow. The staging is by ASH, New York–based designers who mix vintage and flea-market pieces with the highest of the high end. “This is only the third time it’s been on the market in 170 years,” Alt tells the client as we ascend the stairs. “I want you to see what being in a 24-foot house versus a 22-foot house is like. It’s volumetric. If you know boats, it’s like the difference between a 30-foot boat and a 35-foot boat.” (I don’t know boats, but the client nods.)
Alt’s path to real estate may help explain her niche. She was raised in Buffalo, where her mother was a high-school art teacher and her father owned a chain of bead stores. She joined the Boston Ballet’s pre-professional program at 15, but dance didn’t pay the bills, so when she moved to New York a few years later, Alt took an internship at Into the Gloss, which in 2014 launched Glossier, and where she stayed for six years running social media. “Glossier was my college,” she says. Alt has requisite perfect skin, very shiny hair, and a high, clear voice you can hear being the first in the class to answer a teacher’s question. She likes “being a know-it-all,” she says.
In 2020, Alt quit Glossier to consult for other brands. She and her husband, the architect Sharif Khalje, were also looking for a new apartment. She would walk around the city and write down house numbers, then spend hours deep-diving on the architectural history blog Daytonian in Manhattan or on ACRIS, the city-records database. “I know every block in the Village, Tribeca,” she says. Alt found herself and Khalje a floor-through apartment in an 1880s townhouse, also on 12th street, and realized she should make her new hobby into a job. “It was flexible enough that I could keep dancing. And earning potential was important. I won’t hit a ceiling. And I had an innate interest and passion for it.” She started the Prewar Eva account (named by her friend Krissy Jones, the founder of SkyTing Yoga) and messaged Clayton Orrigo, the Hudson Advisory founder, a former tech entrepreneur and friend of her former boss Emily Weiss. “Eva is the only person I have ever taken on who had no experience,” Orrigo told me.
Alt still dances every day before working her real estate business.
Photo: Dina Litovsky
Hudson Advisory is affiliated with listings behemoth Compass but runs almost like an exclusive ultra-luxury club: Nearly all its business comes in through referrals. A third of its $4 billion in sales are private transactions, Orrigo says, meaning they never even make it to a public listing. Later this year, the team will move into the retail space at 160 Leroy, the modernist cement-and-glass building with undulating windows on the Hudson River designed by Ian Schrager and architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron. (Alt would know.)
Alt’s many lives give her fluency across overlapping well-heeled circles below 14th Street. For her semi-Bohemian “downtown community” — other dancers, artists, gallery owners, designers, actors — she sees herself more as a “curator” than an agent. She still dances every day, often at Steps on Broadway, biking from rehearsals to showings with ballet shoes in her bag. Last year she performed in her own solo show at New York Live Arts and danced at the Met. But her rolodex also includes the recently IPO-ed, hedge funders, influencers like Weiss and Jones, and media figures like Architectural Digest editor Amy Astley. “I like to work with people that I know,” she says — it just so happens she knows the kind of people buying a two-bedroom penthouse with clerestory windows overlooking Gramercy Park ($2.75 million); an Upper West Side duplex in an 1891 brownstone with terracotta floors and three fireplaces ($1.5 million); and a Noho loft in the historic Robbins & Appleton building ($1.975 million). “She’s not just trying to jam some house down my throat that in a year I’m going to be upset about,” the client says when we get to the top floor of the townhouse. Plus, Alt “knows everything about the Village — who might get pregnant in a year and want to move, who is looking to expand.”
Her real passion, a building’s provenance, is what she looks for; it makes a listing not just expensive, but “blue chip,” significant, like a piece of art itself. “Who lived here before? What were they like? What were they doing?” Alt asks. “That’s just so special to New York.” She was once aghast that a fellow broker who was showing her a loft didn’t know it had belonged to the choreographer Trisha Brown. “He said, ‘Who’s that?’” She just closed on a corner loft for a buyer in Greenwich Village that used to belong to the artists Paul Jenkins and Willem de Kooning ($3.15 million).
Alt is aware that the version of New York she’s preserving is by now inescapably rarefied. “Every time a house comes up, or a really special anything, that I know is at a price point only a very, very wealthy person can buy,” she says, “it does break my heart a little bit.” Most of the homes that used to belong to artists are going to financiers and tech guys. “Look at Soho,” she says. “No artists live there.” The townhouse on 12th Street was first occupied by stonecutters; the last two owners were LLCs. (There is a sense that Alt’s taste is especially coveted by people who might not have their own.) Alt sees herself as a “dreamer, but a realist.” If the townhouse sells, she stands to make a six-figure commission. “You can’t make money as a dancer,” she tells me. “This is the harsh reality of that art form. I don’t have rich parents.” Accordingly, she would never turn down a listing for not being special — but she might not post it.
Prewar Eva is the opposite of harsh reality, perfect squares of dream New York lives like snapshots from movie sets. Alt has her favorite icons: the Dakota, Hotel Des Artistes. “It’s like finding the side of New York that’s never changed,” she says while locking up after the showing. “These buildings have been built for hundreds of years, and they’re still standing.” Her client told her he would think about it.
Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images
On early Sunday afternoon, local police began shutting down the streets around Keter Torah synagogue in Teaneck, a normally quiet suburb in New Jersey. A wall of cops assembled on the street in front of the building, dividing two angry throngs: on one side demonstrators with Israeli flags, and on the other demonstrators with Palestinian flags. The groups hurled increasingly familiar insults at one another ranging from “asshole” to “baby killer.” Inside, approximately 400 prospective buyers were attending a real-estate convention called the Great Israeli Real Estate Event.
The Great Israeli Real Estate Event is an annual exhibition produced by Gideon Katz, a self-described “expert in marketing Israeli real estate to the global Jewish community.” Its aim is to help American and Canadian buyers answer questions about buying property in Israel, and to showcase available properties. This year, the event had planned stops in synagogues in Montreal and Toronto before Teaneck; then it would be onto Lawrence and eventually, on March 13, Flatbush. Initially, he’d considered canceling because of the war. But ultimately, he decided to lean in instead. This was actually an ideal time for Americans to invest in Israeli properties, Katz said on local Israeli news channels, due to rising fears of antisemitism, along with the fact that real-estate experts predict that land value in Israel will increase once the war is over. “In a world where uncertainty looms and anti-Semitism shows its face more boldly than ever, the decision to invest in a home in Israel is not just wise,” he wrote in an advertisement for the event. “It’s exhilarating!
At most of the events was a company called My Home in Israel, brought along to showcase available properties in both Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies: multiple units in a building near Givat HaMatos in East Jerusalem, townhouses in near Ari’el University in the heart of the West Bank, and a five-bedroom villa with a pool in the luxury enclave of Efrat south of Bethlehem. The latter apparently “transcends mere housing; it embodies architectural brilliance. Conceived by the esteemed architects at Shahar Ben Hamo, this project graces the slopes of Fig Hill, promising a setting of unrivaled serenity.”
From the first stop, in Montreal, protesters have shown up to condemn the sale of houses built on settlements illegally expropriated from Palestinians in the West Bank. In Toronto, a man attacked pro-Palestinian protesters with a nail gun. Things escalated ahead of Teaneck, when a video of a Jewish resident named Rich Siegel denouncing the event went viral. “There’s a genocide going on,” he said in the video. “What this real-estate event is going to do is fan the flames.” The Teaneck protests were especially large, drawing both locals and out-of-towners.
The event began getting so much attention that an unrelated company, with an extremely similar name, got caught up in the fracas. Home in Israel, a Netanya-based company that works in partnership with Keller Williams, has also been touring through Canada, New Jersey, and New York over the past month. Because of their names, people began conflating the two. After the Teaneck event, Home in Israel attempted to publicly distinguish itself from My Home in Israel. A representative from Home in Israel told the Times that they have no properties in the settlements, though some of their listings are in neighborhoods available exclusively to Jews (unlike the U.S., restrictive covenants are legal in Israel). And in response to the imbroglio in Toronto earlier this month, Keller Williams also clarified that it is not affiliated with My Home in Israel and advised agents to “stay away” from further events that might draw protests. (Adding to the confusion: There is also a third company, called My Israel Home, which has also recently been on a North American tour. Its available properties are largely in the Jerusalem area on the Israeli side of the 1949 armistice line, though its website shows one property sold in the West Bank settlement of Ganei Modiin.)
The Great Israeli Real Estate Event ultimately decided to cancel its final stop, which was supposed to be held at Flatbush’s Khal Bnei Avrohom Yaakov synagogue. “At the recommendation of the NYPD, an Israel real estate sales event that was scheduled to take place at the Shul on Avenue N and East 27th Street tomorrow will not take place at this location,” the Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition wrote in a notice to its community. “The Rabbonim are asking all those who were planning to counter-protest to please not attend.” But according to the WhatsApp channel “Flatbush Scoop,” the event actually did go forward — it was just moved to Zoom. “Israel real estate event in Flatbush with planned protest MOVED TO DIGITAL LIVESTREAM,” read one message in the chat. “Recording will be available afterwards. Everything you need to know about buying in Israel!”
The National Association of Realtors has reached a $418 million settlement over agent commissions, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. As part of the settlement, the powerful trade group has agreed to eliminate its rules on sales commissions, meaning that the 6 percent commission, the decadeslong standard for anyone selling a home in this country — is no more. Industry types all seem to agree that this will likely have far-reaching implications for the real-estate industry and homeowners — the New York Times writes that housing experts expect it “could trigger one of the most significant jolts in the U.S. housing market in 100 years.” But what, exactly, can we expect?
In October, a federal jury ruled that the National Association of Realtors had conspired to artificially inflate commissions and ordered the powerful trade group to pay damages of $1.8 billion. The ruling was the result of an anti-trust suit brought by a group of Missouri home sellers in 2019, which argued that the industrywide practice of requiring the seller to pay both the seller’s and buyer’s agent commissions, and setting a nationwide standard of 5 to 6 percent, which is much higher than in many other countries, violated anti-trust laws.
While NAR initially vowed to appeal the ruling, the group has undergone internal tumult with a sexual-harassment scandal and a series of leaders departing in quick succession. There were other compelling reasons to settle: Because the case involved anti-trust violations, the plaintiffs could have been eligible for triple damages of $5.4 billion, the Times reported. And separate litigation in Chicago expected to go to trial this year could have threatened a damages award of more than $40 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In addition to the suit against NAR, there are more than a dozen copycat class-action suits against the country’s largest brokerages. Some have settled their suits — Anywhere Real Estate, which includes the Corcoran Group, Sotheby’s International Real Estate, Coldwell Banker, and Century 21, paid $83.5 million in September. Others, notably Warren Buffett’s HomeServices of America, have not.
The most immediate impact is expected to be a drop in commissions — economists who spoke with the Times estimated that they could fall by 30 percent — as a result of home sellers being able to negotiate fees with their agents. And buyers, who must now pay their own agents, may elect to forgo one altogether, or opt for pared-down services, like having an agent prepare an offer and a contract, while conducting home searches, inspections, and other parts of the sales process alone. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is debatable: While sites like Zillow and Redfin have made it easier to find homes, brokers argue that buyers benefit from representation, and if they must pay agents out of their own pockets, many will opt not to use one — to their detriment.
There is a widespread hope that a reduction in commissions, which are baked into sales prices, may cause home prices to fall, but that remains to be seen.
Besides less money, at least for some, it’s widely believed that it will lead to a winnowing of the industry — The Wall Street Journal reports that the shake-up could drive out hundreds of thousands of agents.
The settlement will also have implications for Multiple Listings Services across the country, the dominant way that agents outside New York City list their properties. (In New York, the Real Estate Board of New York, REBNY, which is not affiliated with NAR, has its own real-estate listings service.) Previously, getting a listing in the MLS — a necessity of selling in many markets — required joining NAR and following its rules. If that’s no longer necessary, “you’re going to see innovation,” says Jason Haber, a Compass agent who recently launched an alternative broker-trade group, the American Real Estate Association.
It’s hard to say this early on. Some have likened the fallout to the demise of travel agents and the rise of online booking sites like Expedia and Kayak. One thing is certain, though: Expect more tech start-ups to try to get a piece of the action. We’ve already had emails from several. What remains to be seen is whether the increased competition will actually lead to lower prices or improve buyers’ and sellers’ experiences.
New York agents aren’t part of NAR, so while the settlement doesn’t directly impact things here, the consequences are expected to reverberate throughout the industry. Many of the brokerages operating in the city have already reached separate settlements over agent commissions, and in October REBNY implemented new rules prohibiting listing brokers from paying buyers’ agents.
No, the changes only apply to seller and buyer commissions. Renters still have to pay commissions, which once averaged 12 percent but have increasingly crept up to 15 percent and, in some cases, much more. Last year, City Councilmember Chi Ossé introduced a bill that would require whoever hires the rental broker — in most cases, the landlord — to pay the fee. It didn’t pass, but a few weeks ago, Ossé reintroduced it.
Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty
If you walked around New York City a decade ago, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Donald Trump owned a huge chunk of it. While the biggest landowners in the city have long looked down on his portfolio — “Donald Trump is not a major player in New York City real estate,” a director at the Durst Organization scoffed in 2013 — the former president is perhaps unmatched in his self-promotional bluster and the visibility of his brand.
But Trump’s golden façade has been crumbling for years. Since he was elected president, units in his buildings have sold for less than those in their luxury competitors and struggled with vacancies. Condo boards across Manhattan have voted to remove his name from their buildings; in 2019, even the flagship Trump International Hotel and Tower agreed to reduce the size of his name. But Trump’s grift came into sharper focus after New York attorney general Letitia James’s civil lawsuit in late September, which alleges that Trump and his family fraudulently inflated the value of their properties in order to receive favorable loans and, in the process, hundreds of millions of dollars. In mid-February, Justice Arthur Engoron found the Trump Organization guilty, and the judgment, tallied on February 23, totals $454 million with interest. Engoran’s ruling doesn’t permanently bar Trump and his eldest children from running the Trump Organization, but Trump is barred from running any corporation in the state for three years, while his sons Donald Jr. and Eric are barred for two. James has also stated that if Trump is not able to pay (and he certainly doesn’t seem to have all that cash on hand), she would seize his real estate assets. But what does Trump actually own in New York?
It’s a question that perhaps only Trump and his lawyers can answer — and maybe some government investigators. That said, James’s filing, media reports, and public records paint a pretty good picture of a so-called real-estate “empire” far smaller than his brand suggests. In 2015, there were a reported 17 buildings in Manhattan bearing Trump’s name (along with Central Park’s Wollman Rink and the Trump Golf Links golf course in the Bronx). But a number of those have since shed their Trump branding, and it appears his hold on many of the remaining properties is tenuous at best — one licensing-deal expiration away.
1 Central Park West
Trump owns the service areas.
Trump International Hotel
Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Although it’s a popular target for anti-Trump protests, the Columbus Circle building, which is roughly half hotel rooms and half condos, is owned by General Electric and Ohio’s Galbreath Company, which hired Trump to glitz it up in 1996. What Trump does own here, according to the New York Times, are the parking garage, the valet booth, room-service kitchens, lobby bathrooms, a restaurant space, and one unit.
In 2019, condo owners demanded the removal of Trump’s large, block-letter name from the façade for dragging down their property values. In a compromise suggested by Donald Trump Jr., the building ended up splitting the façade in two: the left half reads “Trump International Hotel” and the right, “One Central Park West” — both in a serif font that’s slightly smaller and less tacky than before.
725 Fifth Avenue
The Trump Organization owns the retail and commercial portions of the building and Trump owns a triplex apartment here.
Trump Tower
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The Trump Organization owns the retail and commercial portion of the 58-story Trump Tower, where Trump infamously descended on an escalator before his run for the White House. This is its headquarters after all. Letitia James’s filing alleges that Trump significantly inflated the square footage of his triplex apartment here, claiming that it spanned as much as 33,000 feet when it was just over 10,000 feet. “Based on that inflated square footage, the value of the apartment in 2015, in 2016, was $327 million,” James noted. “To this date, no apartment in New York City has ever sold for close to that amount.”
Trump Tower has reportedly struggled with high vacancies (though a cast of infamous characters has called it home). In 2021, the Trump Organization’s $100 million mortgage on the building was put on a watch list before the company refinanced it this year. According to the Washington Post, a MAGA-affiliated PAC was recently one of its most reliable tenants, paying $37,500 per month to lease office space and another $3,000 per month for a kiosk in the lobby — despite the lobby being closed.
40 Wall Street
Trump owns the ground lease.
The Trump Building
Photo: Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
This Great Depression–era skyscraper on Wall Street features prominently in James’s lawsuit: She accused Trump of valuing the building as high as $530 million in 2013, despite a bank-ordered appraisal that had put its worth at $220 million the previous year.
And while 40 Wall Street is one of Trump’s largest holdings, he doesn’t actually own the property. Rather, he owns the “ground lease” to the 72-story building, which requires him to pay rent to the landowners — the obscure but wealthy Hinneberg family of Germany.
1290 Sixth Avenue
Trump owns a 30 percent stake.
Photo: Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Trump acquired a chunk of 1290 Avenue of the Americas almost by accident, when Hong Kong investors who’d bailed him out of a residential project near Lincoln Center swapped it for the midtown office building instead — leaving Trump with a 30 percent stake in the office building that is locked up until 2044 — which means he can’t sell it until then (when he’ll be 97 years old). The Hong Kong investors then sold their controlling interest to Vornado. Trump has no control over the building’s management or branding, but his share on paper is one of his company’s biggest assets.
James accuses Trump of conveniently omitting the restrictions of the share — like not being able to sell it for decades — in his financial statements, which falsely portrayed the amount as “cash” that he controlled. James said Trump cherry-picked numbers to create “false and misleading valuations” that made the property appear to be worth $1.5 billion more than it was in reality.
502 Park Avenue
Trump may own some units.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Trump reportedly owned 23 apartments in this 32-story building as of 2013, which included unsold condos and rental units. In 2011, Ivanka Trump rented one of the unsold penthouses, which included an option to buy it for $8.5 million. But shortly thereafter, the Trump Organization claimed the unit was worth $25 million without disclosing the far cheaper price offered to Ivanka. Another issue was that 12 of the building’s apartments are rent-stabilized — Don Jr. has reportedly called them “the bane of my existence” — and appraised by a bank at $750,000 in total. The Trump Organization claimed those apartments were worth as much as $50 million. This creative accounting enabled the Trump Organization to value the building as high as $350 million, James’s lawsuit said. But in reality, it was worth much less — $72.5 million, according to a 2010 valuation.
4–8 East 57th Street
Trump owns the ground lease.
Photo: Patti McConville/Alamy Stock Photo
Trump owns the ground lease but not the land under 4–8 East 57th Street, a cavernous single-tenant commercial building formerly known as Niketown. This means he’s paying ground rent to an entity known as 57 Street Associates, which is associated with an obscure midtown real-estate company called Digby Management, according to public records.
James’s filing alleges that Trump essentially took a number from 1995 and multiplied it by a fixed percentage every year to come up with an inflated valuation of $422 million while omitting that its ground rent to the landowner was “increasing substantially.”
Nike moved out in 2017. In 2018, Tiffany & Co. moved in temporarily while it renovated its flagship store nearby — but it will be moving out soon.
100–106 Central Park South
Trump may own some units.
Trump Parc
Photo: Kenneth Grant/Alamy Stock Photo
Trump bought 106 Central Park South, a 38-story hotel (now referred to as Trump Parc) and 100 Central Park South, an apartment building, in 1981 to turn into luxury condos. The 14-story 100 Central Park South (referred to as Trump Parc East) came with tenants in rent-controlled and rent-stabilized units, whom Trump unsuccessfully tried to harass into leaving — instead, he ended up having to pay their legal fees.
Today, Trump’s ownership here is likely limited to a handful of apartments. That’s after he sold a few units to Eric, his son, for well below market price in 2016, which could have saved him a hefty tax bill, a ProPublica investigation found.
167 East 61st Street
Trump may own some units.
Trump Plaza
Photo: Google Maps
Trump reportedly owns two units in this 36-story Upper East Side co-op building which still bears his name.
845 United Nations Plaza
Trump doesn’t own it.
Photo: imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo
This 376-unit midtown residential condo building came under scrutiny in 2018 when the Qatari government bought a $6.5 million apartment here while Trump was in the White House. A Trump Organization attorney said the building is owned by its third-party condo owners, not Trump, and therefore Trump would not profit from Qatar’s purchase. But legal experts pointed out that the Trump Organization could still be collecting fees from Qatar as the building’s property manager, which could have violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause forbidding those holding federal office from receiving gifts from a foreign state or its representatives. During the 1990s and aughts, Derek Jeter, Bill Gates, Harrison Ford, and Kellyanne Conway owned or rented units here.
610 Park Avenue
Trump never owned it.
Photo: Google Maps
On it’s website, the Trump Organization lists the condo building at 610 Park Avenue as part of its real-estate portfolio. It’s just the property manager though. The owner is Colony Capital, which bought the building from the former Mayfair Hotel in a bankruptcy auction in 1998. Trump has never claimed owning any part of the building.
200 East 69th Street
Trump doesn’t own it.
Photo: Google Maps
Trump bought and razed the former New York Foundling Hospital building to erect Trump Palace, which, at 55 stories, was the Upper East Side’s tallest structure when it was finished in 1991. Residents of the condo building included Keith Olbermann, who tweeted when he sold his condo in 2016 that he had gotten back “90% of my money and 100% of my soul.”
There’s no indication that Trump still owns any part of this building. In 2021, the co-op removed Trump’s name from the façade — to the relief of many residents.
140, 160, 180, 200, 220, and 240 Riverside Boulevard
Trump doesn’t own it.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Until recently, six of the most vaunted residential buildings on Riverside Boulevard were named “Trump Place” — but Trump didn’t build them. He originally bought the lot in 1985 as part of a failed pitch to turn it into a vast complex called “Television City.” Facing bankruptcy in the 1990s, Trump sold a controlling interest in the project to a group of Hong Kong investors (he was left with a 30 percent stake). The investors built three residential towers before selling them to Extell and the Carlyle Group, then used the proceeds from that sale to buy 1290 Avenue of the Americas from Apollo and Jamestown, which transferred Trump’s minority stake to 1290 (and removed him from any ownership in the Riverside towers).
Extell, the site’s new owner, sold the three buildings (140, 160, and 180 Riverside Boulevard) to Equity Residential, then built three more. The newer three (200, 220, and 240 Riverside Boulevard) are managed by the Trump Organization, though all six initially carried Trump’s branding. The non-Trump-managed properties began removing his name as soon as he was elected in 2016, and by 2019, all six buildings had voted to dump “Trump.” There’s no indication that Trump owns any units here.
246 Spring Street
Trump never owned it.
Photo: Stacy Walsh Rosenstock/Alamy Stock Photo
Trump never invested money into building this condo hotel. But he struck a deal with its partners — including Russian-mafia-linked convicted felon Felix Sater, to license the Trump name and manage the building, which he first announced on The Apprentice. In 2015, Sater helped Trump pursue a deal to open a Trump Tower in Moscow, bragging to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen that he had close ties to Vladimir Putin. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote.
Trump SoHo drew protests from locals as soon as it was announced and struggled to attract guests and buyers. It was later hit by a lawsuit from condo owners who accused the Trump Organization of inflating sales numbers to entice them into buying, then another lawsuit by an employee at Sater’s firm, Bayrock, who alleged that the hotel was a front for money laundering. Trump cut ties with the building in 2017, and he has since claimed he wouldn’t recognize Sater if they were in the same room.
500 Hutchinson River Parkway
Trump never owned it.
Photo: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo
Updated February 23, 2024: Bally’s Corporation purchased the golf course in 2023 and changed the name to Bally Links in January.
This golf course on a former landfill in the Bronx was built by New York City with a reported $127 million in taxpayer money. In 2012, the city granted Trump a 20-year license to operate the course with a 100-foot-wide “Trump Golf Links” sign visible from the Whitestone Bridge — a sweet deal that has allowed Trump “to keep almost every dollar that flows in,” according to the Washington Post. But those days are almost over, as the contract is set to expire early next year.
The city is currently facing demands from City Council members and families of 9/11 victims to end the contract even earlier — before a planned women’s tournament in mid-October that’s backed by the Saudi government. But the mayor and the city’s parks department have refused, saying that would mean paying Trump as much as a $30 million termination fee in addition to possibly getting sued.
It turns out that of the many Trump-branded or -associated properties, he appears to own just a few units or portions of a building, such as at Trump Tower. In most other cases, Trump’s name on a building represents a licensing agreement, a condition of sale, or the Trump Organization’s role as property manager. Trump’s only equity in many of “his” buildings appears limited to a handful of unsold apartments or common spaces — if any at all. In effect, his footprint in New York has already been shrinking for years, and James’s lawsuit, while it may never come to fruition, has laid that bare.
A photo of the living room, featured in the listing, showcases the library Leibovitz built into the apartment after buying it in 2014.
Photo: Corcoran Group
Annie Leibovitz has sold her sprawling Central Park West duplex for $10.625 million, which is $2 million over the asking price, according to city records.
The celebrity photographer bought the four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath apartment in 2014 to be closer to her daughters’ school, according to a story in the New York Times from last October, when the property went on the market. It was listed with top Corcoran broker Deborah Kern, who said at the time that the co-op — located at 88 Central Park West in the prewar known as the Brentmore, where Sting, Paul Simon, and Lorne Michaels have all lived — was “priced to sell.” The closing price likely reflects a bidding war, but the sale was still a loss for the photographer: Leibovitz paid $11.3 million for the apartment. Still, she’s likely relieved to have it settled. “I live and work downtown,” she told the Times, “and our house upstate is now our family home.”
Located on the fifth floor, the apartment has Central Park views, which you can see slightly in this photo of the kitchen that was featured in the listing.
Photo: Corcoran Group
Kern declined to comment on the sale. Leibovitz renovated the apartment’s kitchen and several other spaces in 2014 but wisely left all the pretty prewar details intact. It has Central Park West views and, as you might expect for a photographer, great light.
Leibovitz is something of a local property maven. In addition to owning a 228-acre spread in Rhinebeck, she bought and sold several Manhattan properties, including a three-building complex in the West Village. Earlier this month, she also listed her West Village loft for $8.5 million.
The buyers of the Central Park West apartment are Gregg E. Zehr and Kim M. Cooper, according to records. Cooper appears to be a longtime general counsel at Apple. Zehr, who recently retired from Amazon as the head of its hardware-development division, is credited with creating the Kindle. If he still has any physical books left, Leibovitz built a personal library out of a corner of the massive living room.
This photo of the office that was used in the listing shows a workspace that Leibovitz built out for herself after buying the four-bedroom in 2014.
Photo: Corcoran Group