15 Central Park West, Secrets, Real Estate

Here are the Secrets of the most expensive real estate in the US if not the world. Thanks to CAROLINE HOWE and The Daily Mail UK we have great photos for you and a simple story that details some of the most famous people living there or that have lived there. I would rather have a townhouse on a quiet street if I had their money than go for a white high rise structure facing Central park or any park were there is always people around. But this is New York and we don’t accommodate the rich here, the rich being that we have so many here, they accommodate us.  

Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue…so passé. If you want the good life in the Big Apple and you happen to have a spare $15 or so million check out 15 Central Park West.

Penthouses have sold for close to a mind-boggling $100 million each and residents have included an unlikely mix of Hollywood A-listers, Russian and Chinese oligarchs, hi-tech moguls from Google and Yahoo! and big names from Wall Street.

‘The residents of 15 CPW are our latter-day priesthood of power. 15 CPW is the high altar of their secular religion,’ writes Michael Gross in his latest chronicle of 'real estate porn', House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address, published by Atria today.

 

Luxury: Initial asking price on the smallest unit was a modest $1.78 million. The bulk of the rest had asking prices between $5 million and $9,999,999

'Cramped'? Kelsey Grammer's then wife, Camille, famously complained that a $3,500sq ft apartment was too small. ‘That seems pretty obnoxious [but] I’m used to living in a substantial sized house,’ she added

According to Gross the residents of 15 CPW are members of ‘the floating crap game of wealth.’  As he puts it, it’s not inherited wealth that gets one a pad at 15 CPW. Instead ‘you just need a big checkbook.’ And there's plenty of fat wallets in residence with billionaires living on top of billionaires.

In 2006, Denzel Washington bought his apartment for $13 million – modest compared to other units in the building. He already owned a mansion in Beverly Hills. Gross says the proximity to Broadway inspired the actor’s purchase. 

'Fortunately,' Washington boasted, 'I’m independently wealthy. I mean, I got enough money is what I’m saying. I got a couple of dollars.'

Still, Denzel didn’t refuse a small discount on the purchase price in exchange for using his name to potential neighbors. As a prominent African-American and A-lister, his buy-in gave the marketers of 15CPW early bragging rights.

 

 

Kelsey Grammer, appearing on Broadway in La Cage aux Folles, rented 14K for $29,000-a-month, for himself and his then-wife Camille, a star of the reality show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. 

The show even videotaped a segment with Camille and Kelsey and their children inspecting the apartment, the housewife declaring in the segment that the luxury 3,500 square foot apartment was too small. 

‘That seems pretty obnoxious [but] I’m used to living in a substantial sized house,’ she added.

But by the time the episode aired, eight months’ later, Camille had filed for divorce from the Frasier star. According to Gross, Camille had called her hubby from California and someone in the building told her that Kelsey’s wife was already in the building. 

‘They genuinely didn’t know that Grammer was having a fling’ with Kayte Walsh, a former flight attendant 27 years his junior. 

Sting moved into his $26.5 million digs after a massive renovation and the installation of his own private elevator so he wouldn’t have to ride with another resident. He also has his own private chef and three or four assistants tending to his every need.

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Revolving doors: Gross' book reveals how A-Rod would order hookers to turn up just before or after his then girlfriend Cameron Diaz would turn up. He was allegedly hated by the staff

But it was baseball superstar Alex ‘A-Rod’ Rodeiquez who caused the most buzz in the luxury building.

Once the highest paid New York Yankee (recently suspended for 162 games because of allegations he used performance enhancing drugs) A-Rod was one of the prominent celebrity renters, shelling out $30,000-a-month. He was also an all-star bachelor womanizer. 

'He was a douche,' Gross quotes a 15 CPW staffer. 'No one liked him…Not a nice guy, an unfriendly narcissist.'

One day he was with Cameron Diaz, according to the book, and ten minutes later he was with Kate Hudson. The staff thought Diaz was way too nice for A-Rod who used the residence as home plate with visitors including Madonna. 

'He got hookers all the time,' Gross quotes a building member. 'Usually two at a time, two times a week. One time he had two go up, they came down and left, and ten minutes later, Cameron Diaz walks in. He doesn’t care. I hate the guy. He thought he was God.'

'Fifteen,' observes Gross, 'is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century – with jaw-dropping excess.'

So what does a mogul get for his or her big bucks?

To serve its demanding tenants, the building has a staff of more than four dozen – seven concierges, six doormen, eight white-gloved lobby attendants, three package-room attendants, eight porters, a maintenance man, four security guards and 12 part-time engineers.

There’s a walnut wood-lined library, a fancy screening room, a private 66-seat restaurant offering room service, a health club and a seventy-foot pool – in a prime New York location overlooking Central Park.

With all the luxuries, 15 CPW has become a celebrity in its own right, a building with fascinating and iconic DNA.

The location itself, the southwest corner of Central Park, was a potential goldmine. In the years following the economic decline after the stock market debacle in 1987, the Mayflower Hotel, a 'comfortable' residential hotel, stood where 15 CPW now soars. 

The Mayflower had once been the home of Felix the Cat creator Patrick Sullivan and the eccentric Max Schaffer, who owned the bizarre Times Square emporium Hubert’s Museum on 42nd Street and its fabled flea circus. The hotel also was home to the Bolshoi Ballet in 1979.

But by 2000, the Mayflower, which opened in 1926, was long past its glory days. 

The only thing it had going for it was 'a front row seat on the park that’s as comfortable as a Barcalounger', according to the 2000 New York Times Guide to Hotels in New York City.

The area around the hotel had become run down, too. 

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Indiscreet: Camille Grammer caught Kelsey cheating on her when she called from LA only to be told his 'wife' was already in the Manhattan building

There was an ugly fence around the statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle, a block south of the Mayflower, and homeless people and derelicts slept on blankets on nearby sidewalks and peddled old books, annoying passersby and tourists. 

Still, anything near Central Park was considered top real estate.

Enter the prescient and shrewd Zeckendorf brothers – Will and Arthur, developers of luxury buildings - who picked up the Mayflower for what was a New York song - $401 million, and would turn it into an unimaginable tower of power by 2008.

'The Zeckendorfs were targeting the rootless, new global elite, the newest new money, the kind of customers who will pay $10 million or more for a Central Park-view apartment,' Gross writes.

'Major wealth was created by those people,' stated Arthur Zeckendorf referring to the buyers, and it was money just sitting around waiting to be spent.

Apartments were sold at 15 CPW before they were completed and the prospectus promised that that the building would 'meet every reasonably exacting standard'. 

Initial asking price on the smallest unit was a modest $1.78 million. The bulk of the rest had asking prices between $5 million and $9,999,999.

The penthouse on the 42nd floor, with what is described as 'the incredible King of the World terrace' has a living room open on three sides and a master bedroom with Gay White Way views.

It also includes a maid’s room and a kitchenette off the master bedroom where the owner can have a late-night snack or get an espresso in the morning.

But it’s been the celebrity and masters of the universe inhabitants of the building that caught Gross’s imagination and that of the New York media, which often ran gossip column items about the comings and goings of the rich and famous.

Paparrazi wait outside hoping to shoot not only the superstar tenants but also the celeb friends of owners who often drop by - the likes of  Alec Baldwin, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Robert Downey Jr., Robert De Niro, Lady Gaga, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen and Jake Gyllenhaal who have graced the halls.

As Gross reported, the staff sees all - and don’t always keep their lips sealed. 'We know your secrets,' one staffer promised.

Gross tracked down an engineer, identified by the presumed pseudonym of Pasco Cornejo, who formerly worked on the building’s staff. 

He recalled going into one apartment that had a water issue, and was shocked to encounter a wide variety of sex toys and the resident 'walking around with very sexy see-through. We’d see her diddling herself,' Cornejo revealed.

One high profile condo owner is Lloyd Blankfein, CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He had a wall of security around him and was, according to Gross, inundated with no less than 100 pieces of hate mail a day following a 2009 expose of Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone. 

The 15 CPW Staff were not permitted to address him by name. 

Wall Street mogul Sandy Weill also has a security detail and had installed an elaborate security system in his $43.7m pad that raised his bill another $10 million.

 

Another resident installed moisture sensors that email the resident manager if there is a leak, temperature sensors on water pipes and an anemometer on the roof that measures wind speeds and retracts the canvas awning on the terrace.

It pays to work at 15 CPW, Gross noted, because staff tips could be astronomical.  Sandy Weill handed out $90,000 in tips the first year. The typical resident gave $100 to $500 to each employee. 

In 2011, Gross reported, the average employee’s holiday take was about $22,500. Concierges and anyone performing special favors can pocket up to $100,000. The resident manager’s income was estimated to be $600,000 – even before tips.

Condos had become preferable to co-ops and nosy co-op boards that insisted on seeing a buyer’s financials as well restricting renovations when 15 CPW went up. 

These new buyers had no way of showing credit history because there was no history. They were willing to pay whatever it took. 'They go to developers and say, "You’re asking fifty million dollars? Here’s sixty, but we close next week,'” real estate lawyer Edward Mermelstein told Gross.

The building was as glamorous as anything on ritzy Park or Fifth Avenues and changed the face of the West side of Manhattan.

And it gained a new status when early buyers started flipping or selling their apartments without even occupying them. 

A $13 million investment could yield $27 million. One penthouse was going for $90 million, the other being offered for $80 million in September 2005. 

One broker, Dolly Lenz, stated she knew of four 15 CPW listings asking as much as $150 million. Renting out one’s unit could net as much as $75,000 a month.