I got some really interesting replies from my narrative about $100 million dollar homes. I knew there was a bigger market for homes worth less than that, but the amount of condos selling for $50 million or more is amazing – Condos – No yard. Below is some of the craziness going on now in New York. $11,000 per SF?? Given the zoning issues and height (FAA approval is required), these projects take 10 years or longer to develop. The cycles can change, as we all found out over the past six years. Big risk—Big return.
Not only will I look at the actual construction, location and amenities, but the “why” as well. OK, the “why” is easy: ego. And as it turns out, most of the drive is from foreign investors getting money out of their country. Real Estate is one way to do it. Not sure why they would not buy an income-producing asset, other than they believe the prices are low.
If you look at the timeline in the first article below, you can see the rise of the top drawer condo. This seems to me to be a “too good to be true” over-hyped phenomena. We shall see, but for now the race to pay the most is on. You too can have:
–views
–private everything
–11.5 foot barrel vaulted brick ceilings
–a 60 foot outdoor pool 1,000 feet into the sky
–a lava stone counter…
…You get the picture.
AND this is just New York…..not even the most expensive in the world. For that you will have to wait until next week.
An interesting note: In most of these projects, as well as across the world, the majority of buyers seem to be foreign. Given the hell we have all paid over the Great Recession, we are still the place where wealthy people want to invest their money. This shows you two things: how unstable the rest of the world is AND even in our darkest days, the United States of America is still the best country in the world to live and work. A note of gratitude to our founders.
Craig
602.954.3762
ccoppola@leearizona.com
New York’s First $100 Million Apartment Is Coming Soon
In a city consumed by luxury condominiums, no price is too high to pay. Michael Gross reports on the race to a nine-figure sale.
By: Michael Gross
January/February 2014
56 Leonard
The Midtown Manhattan skyline, as seen from 56 Leonard, a 60-story condo by Herzog & de Meuron in New York’s TriBeCa.
Forget the gated motor court, the private courtyard or the waterfall in the lobby and check out the dizzying view from atop 50 United Nations Plaza. Manhattan’s Rocky Mountains—the skyscraper tops of the Empire State, the Chrysler, Rockefeller Center and MetLife—all seem close enough to touch. You can see the network of bridges connecting the city to the rest of the world; the East and Hudson rivers; the Statue of Liberty; the new One World Trade Center. In the distance, airplanes take off from Kennedy and LaGuardia. And straight down below sit Louis Kahn’s Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park and the UN itself.
The Foster+Partners–designed condominium tower is still under construction; its triplex penthouse (complete with a 50-foot-long heated outdoor pool and a Foster-created, one-piece stainless-steel staircase—both hoisted up to the aerie by crane) doesn’t even have walls yet. But since they will be walls of glass, the views won’t change once they’re installed.
What has changed? The asking price.
When 50 UN was topped out in July 2013, two separate apartments—a $55 million duplex and a $45 million full-floor penthouse below it—were the most expensive units. But in October, developers Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf (whose grandfather sold the UN its site) and Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s Global Holdings upped the ante. The day before departures’ visit, they sent out word: The two could be purchased together as a triplex. Its $100 million price, if achieved, would set a new record for a New York City apartment.
Crazy? Hardly. A senior advisor to a Middle Eastern ruler toured 50 UN a day after our visit. And you would want it, too, if you had the dough. As the bar for entry into the heights of New York’s real estate market rises ever higher, potential buyers haven’t blinked. A nine-figure sale no longer seems like a dream. Instead, it appears inevitable. By the time you read this, it may already have happened. “The psychological barrier has been broken,” says Arthur Zeckendorf, sounding a little stunned himself. “It’s like a snowball. Everybody wants in on the action, and it gets bigger and bigger. Obviously, an apartment like that is a trophy, but it’s also proven to be a sound investment.”
The American tycoon already owns a Manhattan penthouse condo—not to mention several companies and a professional sports team. But when his broker tells him about a newer, better apartment he has to see, he agrees, of course. As he walks around it, he starts hyperventilating. “It’s breathtaking, the most beautiful thing I’ve seen,” he gasps, but in an instant, he looks stricken. What’s the problem? “Oh my God,” says the billionaire. “Do not show this to my wife. If you show her, I’ll have to buy it.”
The roots of today’s price spike are shallow. As recently as ten years ago, the highest-priced apartments were cooperatives, still the predominant form of home ownership in New York City today. But because co-ops generally require intrusive financial disclosures while limiting purchasers’ ability to alter and use their apartments, foreigners, investors and the secretive rich long disdained them. Luxury condominiums are a relatively recent phenomenon; the first, Olympic Tower, opened its doors in 1976. In 2003 a condo in Columbus Circle’s Time Warner Center took the most-costly crown for the first time when a Mexican financier bought two apartments for $45 million and then scooped up a third for a total sum of $54.8 million. No co-op has held the city’s apartment price record since.
In December 2011, former Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill set the current sales record when he unloaded a penthouse at 15 Central Park West to the then-22-year-old daughter of Russian potash oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $88 million. A frenzy of “can you top this” listings soon followed; the flag had dropped on the race to nine figures. The following May, Gary Barnett, founder of condo developer Extell, leaked word of a signed contract for a $90 million–plus penthouse atop his One57, a 1,004-foot-tall, Christian de Portzamparc–designed hotel-condo tower a few blocks from the 15 Central Park West property. Then Steven Klar, also a developer, offered his penthouse at CitySpire—a West 56th Street condo tower by Helmut Jahn—for $100 million despite its awkward layout (three rings of rooms arrayed like a race track around the building’s core) and the fact that One57 now partly blocks its once expansive view of Central Park. The price attracted so much attention, the listing crashed his broker’s website.
In One57’s wake, what once might have been deal-breakers became mere bumps in the road; neither its construction crane, famously felled in Hurricane Sandy, nor the sneers of architecture critics (“tall and clunky, preening yet graceless”) slowed its juggernaut. In May 2013 it emerged that an investment group led by hedge fund runner Bill Ackman had signed a contract for another penthouse, at $94 million, which will set a new city record once One57 is finished and the deal closes. Casino magnate Steve Wynn’s subsequent purchase of a $70 million penthouse in the Ritz Carlton, a condo-hotel on Central Park South, and David Geffen’s $54 million deal for a 12,000-square-foot Fifth Avenue penthouse (setting the current co-op record) seem comparatively chintzy.
One57’s moment in the sun was eclipsed by developers CIM Group and Harry Macklowe, who have inked a $95 million contract for the penthouse at their Rafael Viñoly–designed 432 Park Avenue, a slender, poured-concrete tower just south of East 57th Street. Not only did it set a higher presumptive price record, but when complete at 1,396 feet, 432 Park will stand 392 feet taller than One57, too. Having seen his sales record fall to Macklowe, Extell’s Barnett is aiming higher. His next planned tower, a block west of One57 and a few blocks south of 15 Central Park West, will rise between 1,400 and 1,550 feet. To date, no one has yet sought to exceed its height. But in the hottest, highest real estate market in memory, many are asking, Why not me?
“On July 4, the fireworks are right up here with us,” says developer Steven Klar, standing on one of the three circular terraces of the sky-high midtown triplex penthouse he is selling for $100 million. “Everything looks nice from up here.” So who’s looking? “The Russians are coming. Asians. I showed it three weeks ago to a Middle Eastern woman who has 19 homes. I can’t imagine that. It’s a different stratosphere.”
Most recently, a triplex penthouse atop the Hotel Pierre was listed for $125 million (the unit set a record when Wall Street’s Martin Zweig bought it for $20 million in 1999). Weeks later the besieged hedge fund runner Steven A. Cohen listed a Charles Gwathmey–designed duplex in Beacon Court on East 58th Street for $115 million. And River House, a Depression-era co-op known as a bastion of secrecy, listed a private club on its premises as a “mansion within a co-op” for a staggering $130 million for the raw space alone. Presumably, serious buyers will consider decorating costs a rounding error.
Obviously, few can afford a $100 million apartment. “It’s not a large universe,” admits Michael Stern, founder of JDS and one of the developers behind Walker Tower, a 1929 Art Deco structure named for its architect, Ralph Thomas Walker. Until the building’s top floor went into contract for the asking price of $55 million in October (a record-setting number for a downtown apartment), the developers hoped it might be combined with the $47.5 million penthouse beneath into a $102.5 million, 12,000-square-foot palace. Because the inventory of ultimate trophy condos is even smaller than the buying pool, their prices, mind-blowing though they may be, are “driven by massive scarcity,” says Elliott Joseph, a principal of Property Markets Group, Walker Tower’s co-developer.
Traditionally, uptown trophy buyers came from finance and the corporate sphere; downtown attracted creative and media types. Now the twain have met at the crest of a rising tide of wealth. “The haves have more and more,” says Hall F. Wilkie, president of the carriage trade brokerage house Brown Harris Stevens. And “upsetting everything,” adds Stern, “are the very wealthy foreign buyers.” Take Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who reportedly agreed to spend $75 million on several apartments in a Fifth Avenue mansion-turned-cooperative and is said to be hungry to swallow the rest of the building. Edward Mermelstein, a lawyer who predominantly represents foreign investors from the former Soviet Union, says the needs of clients like his are simple: “Is this the best? they ask. The best location? The best security? The most prestige? The most exclusivity?”
How about two penthouses? A wealthy, elegant Briton, who’d already bought one at Walker Tower, showed up there not long ago with his decorator. Learning that the $55 million full-floor penthouse had just been released for sale, he asked to see it. One look and he wanted it. Badly. But the price seemed insane, and even though he could afford the whole building, he hesitated—until someone else came to the table. The competition sharpened his thoughts. The solution was obvious: He’d give the smaller unit to his kid. And come to think of it, buy a one-bedroom as a staff apartment, too. But before he could pounce, the prized penthouse went into contract—at a record price in Manhattan.
Foreign wealth “transformed the marketplace,” adds Frederick Warburg Peters of Warburg Realty, and now locals are beginning to follow. Fifteen Central Park West created this new template, as rich New Yorkers who once would have aspired to live in co-ops instead joined the Europeans, Russians, Asians, South Americans, Arabs and Israelis who turned that building into a new sort of club, where the only qualification for entry is almost-unfathomable wealth. “People with more money than they know what to do with are driving this market,” admits a condo developer. Ego is a factor, too. Says another: “Some idiot Russian will want to be the one who pays the highest number.”
He’ll get a lot for his money. Co-ops offered exclusivity, and the best were fabulous homes with lavish spaces and river or park views. The condos that have conquered what was once a co-op city are all that and far more: liquid assets that seem to appreciate at warp speed.
“Real estate has become currency” for the new new money says Izak Senbahar, the Istanbul-born developer of Richard Meier’s 165 Charles Street on the West Side Highway and Herzog & de Meuron’s under-construction 56 Leonard, which will be the glossiest condo tower in TriBeCa. “New York has become a safe piggy bank” in a lawless world. “And it’s sexy. You can only look at gold, but you can enjoy real estate.”
“To be thought of as the best, you have to be different,” says Pamela Liebman, president of the Corcoran Group. Typical amenities like a basement lap pool and health club, climate-controlled wine cellars and private restaurants and screening rooms are all no longer enough. In the past, the wealthy hired architects and decorators to customize their homes and prove they had taste atop wealth. Nowadays they want all that prepackaged.
Where once trophy apartment finishes such as doors, cabinets, hardware and appliances were just adequate, now developers “have to provide impeccable custom touches,” says Related Companies vice president Michael Iannacone, who is selling One Madison, a new tower at the bottom of Madison Avenue. Its $50 million triplex penthouse boasts a double-height great room with a curving glass-and-nickel staircase, a wraparound terrace and a private elevator. At Walker Tower, radiant-heated floors, a Smallbone kitchen (think expensive, then double that) and a museum-quality zoned humidification system for art protection are among each unit’s defining features. “It all sets us apart,” says Walker’s Stern, who realizes he must be student as well as teacher. “We have to know, What will people ask for next?”
Jared Kushner, a second-generation developer and the son-in-law of Donald Trump, thinks he knows. His pride over the six penthouses he is building atop the landmark Puck Building in SoHo is tangible. Despite the deep-downtown location, he says, his ideal buyer “is not an artist in a loft” but an art collector, someone who “wants every luxury imaginable,” including 11.5-foot barrel-vaulted brick ceilings; mahogany-framed windows with UV-tinted glass to protect art; a shower built for three; and a kitchen with a terrazzo and mother-of-pearl floor, a lava-stone counter, a La Cornue five-burner restaurant range, a SubZero double-wide fridge and an espresso machine built into the wall.
So you should buy now, as the future looks to be even higher priced. Like 15 Central Park West and the nearby 220 Central Park South, the Zeckendorfs’ newest, “just-announced” residential tower will be designed by Robert A.M. Stern, on East 60th Street off Park Avenue—one block north of Extell’s second 57th Street structure. The limestone façade will hold 31 apartments, seven 8,800-square-foot duplexes and a 13,000-square-foot triplex with “one giant terrace looking north, east and south,” Arthur promises. “When it’s offered for sale, it will probably be the most expensive apartment in New York.” Next stop, $100 million!
On a small lot next to the landmarked Steinway Hall on West 57th Street, JDS and PMG are planning a needlelike 1,350-foot tower by SHoP Architects with about 100 park- and city-view units inside. Will the highest hit nine figures? “Yes,” says Michael Stern, “but I’m not saying it outright. It’s not through due diligence yet.” And a few blocks southeast, the developer Hines is putting up a Jean Nouvel–designed edifice next door to the Museum of Modern Art. It’s sure to command stratospheric prices, too.
While we wait for those, a broker whispers, unsolicited “astronomical” offers for existing trophy apartments that aren’t even for sale have become increasingly common. The owners of a Time Warner spread, for instance, have spurned $150 million. So how high is up? Way high, says someone very close to Bill Ackman, the buyer of One57’s $94 million penthouse: “He’s waiting for the phone to ring. He has no plans to sell—until someone offers him a billion.”
Countdown to $100M
An annotated history of notable apartment sales in New York City.
1883: $31,680
Units sold at 34 Gramercy Park East (the city’s oldest surviving co-op) usher in the age of apartment living.
1926: $185,000
666 Park Avenue, a palatial maisonette within the marginally less glamorous 660 Park, sells at a record price to Mrs. William Kissam Vanderbilt II. She never moves in.
1931: $275,000
Decades before its private club is listed for $130 million, River House’s tower triplex sells as the ultra-exclusive property’s crown jewel.
1940: $25,000
After the Depression, a record low is set when the Beresford (211 Central Park West) and its neighbor, the San Remo (145–146 Central Park West), sell for pennies on the dollar (above existing mortgages).
1976: $650,000
The high-rise condo era begins with a sale at the Aristotle Onassis–developed Olympic Tower (641 Fifth Avenue). Past is prologue: Almost 80 percent of its buyers are foreign.
1988: $10,000,000
The first eight-figure sale occurs, at 820 Fifth Avenue, a notoriously prickly co-op. To wit: A later buyer can’t gain entrée despite a phone call to the board from Mayor Bloomberg.
2000: $30,000,000
At 740 Park Avenue (home to the highest concentration of billionaires in the country), financier Stephen Schwarzman shells out for the most expensive co-op in history—for now.
2011: $88,000,000
Young money! Twenty-two-year-old Ekaterina Rybolovleva shatters the city’s most-expensive record by purchasing a penthouse pied-à-terre at 15 Central Park West.
2012: $90,000,000
A 90th-floor penthouse contract at One57 (157 W. 57th St.) sets the new presumptive record. Months later, a second penthouse breaks it, going into contract for $94 million.
2013: $95,000,000
A contract for the penthouse at Harry Macklowe’s 432 Park inches ever closer to the $100 million mark. The race to the top is on.
50 UN Plaza
The glass-walled living room overlooks the East River in the Foster+Partners–designed triplex penthouse at 50 UN Plaza.
56 Leonard
The view from a penthouse at TriBeCa’s 56 Leonard.
One Madison
One Madison’s $50 million triplex includes a glass-and-nickel staircase.
56 Leonard
Herzog & de Meuron’s cantilevered 56 Leonard.
One Madison
From the outside looking into One Madison.
Puck Building
A sitting room in one of the Puck Building’s six new units.
One57
West 57th Street’s One57 (left) and 1,350-foot tower by SHoP Architects (right) will define the city’s new skyline.
Walker Tower
Walker Tower, site of a recent $55 million, record-setting sale.
Stratospheric Views, and Prices
By: Julie Creswell
November 3, 2013
Walking slowly to the windows facing the meadow of green that is Central Park, Gary Barnett slips into salesman mode as he spreads his arms wide, embracing the sweeping bird’s-eye view he has from the 87th floor of his shimmering skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.
Noting a visitor’s gasp at the stunning vista, he smiles. “That’s what we want. We want the ‘Oh, wow,’ ” he says.
That ‘oh wow’ factor is part of a 6,250-square-foot, full-floor apartment in his soaring skyscraper, One57, complete with a soon-to-arrive master bedroom tub carved from a single piece of Italian marble. The apartment comes with a hefty price tag of $67 million. Or, put another way, nearly $11,000 per square foot. That’s Per. Square. Foot.
Too rich? Well, there is another, similar apartment a few floors lower that has a number of potential buyers circling it that’s “only $55 million,” Mr. Barnett says before pausing. “I didn’t really say, only $55 million?” He laughs. “It’s all relative.”
And relatively speaking, it is practically a bargain. From the perspective of the overseas buyer, it may very well be. Even as the prices of some of the city’s newest and hottest buildings like One57 stretch into the stratosphere, luxury apartments in Manhattan remain relatively cheap compared to other cosmopolitan cities around the world. That fact is attracting more global buyers to New York.
Last year, an apartment in Monaco’s curvaceous Tour Ode`on sold for $8,850 a square foot. A well-off buyer paid slightly less, $8,779 a square foot, for an apartment in the sleek Frank Gehry-designed Opus Hong Kong.
And in West London, the average price for the 86 apartments in One Hyde Park has been more than $9,500 a square foot, according to research from the British property consulting firm Knight Frank.
At One57, the activist hedge fund king William A. Ackman is reportedly part of an investment group that is paying more than $90 million, or about $6,666 per square foot, for the 13,500-square-foot duplex on the 75th and 76th floor, referred to as the “Winter Garden,” because of its 2,500-square foot-glass-enclosed space that can house either a garden or a swimming pool. One57 is practically a steal at an average price of more than $6,000 a square foot. Another soaring tower on the east side of Midtown, 432 Park Avenue, is asking for $6,894 a square foot, based on its latest offering plan.
This new crop of super-luxurious New York high rises — skyscrapers so tall they needed approval from the Federal Aviation Administration — are attracting Wall Street moneymen, company executives and foreigners alike. Analysts estimate the percentage of foreign buyers in Manhattan real estate has jumped to about 30 or 40 percent of total sales, or double long-running averages.
At new developments like One57, foreigners make up about half the buyers. Among the purchasers are the Canadian businessman Lawrence S. Stroll and Silas F.K. Chou, a native of Hong Kong, business partners who took the fashion label Michael Kors public last year. Buyers from China have bought about 15 percent of the building, including one corporation that bought four apartments.
Manhattan has always attracted a number of well-to-do globe-trotters who would happily spend a couple of million, maybe even $10 million, for a snazzy pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side. But as increased numbers of global billionaires have set their sights on Manhattan, there has been an absolute explosion in prices for top-of-the-market luxury apartments.
One reason for that is simply a low supply of sleek apartments available for the rich and famous. There is not a lot of suitable, empty space in Manhattan for those sorts of developments, which can easily require more than a decade of planning and construction.
With the continued economic malaise across Europe and heightened political unrest in hot spots around the world, foreign and American billionaires alike are seeking safer places to park their assets. New York, say analysts, looks like a pretty safe bet these days.
“We’re building the equivalent of bank safe deposit boxes in the sky that buyers can put all their valuables in and rarely visit,” said Jonathan J. Miller of the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.
Not that long ago, $30 million got you a pretty nice trophy property in Manhattan. At least, that is what people thought in 2000 when Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, paid that record-breaking amount for the sprawling 34-room penthouse at 740 Park Avenue, where John D. Rockefeller Jr. once lived.
This being Manhattan, eye-popping purchases both mirror and amplify the era of real estate excess. As in other major metropolitan cities, New York’s luxury market — defined as the top 10 percent of sales — peaked in early 2009 at an average price of $2,612 a square foot, according to data from Miller Samuel. After dipping to a low of $1,655 later that year, it has rebounded to an average of $2,055 in the third quarter of this year.
New York has always had its share of hot “it” buildings, the exclusive white-glove residences that command megabucks well above market trends — 820 Fifth Ave. or 15 Central Park West, often known as the “hedge fund building.”
In 2008, the former Citigroup chairman Sanford I. Weill paid $44 million for the four-bedroom penthouse in 15 Central Park West.
Four years later, as a wave of buyers from Russia made big splashes in New York trophy apartments, Mr. Weill turned around and sold the apartment for a record-breaking $88 million to a trust set up by the Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev for his daughter Ekaterina and her heirs. While that deal still holds the record for the highest price per square foot paid in New York — $13,049 a square foot — it will most likely be broken next year as sales under contract in the new developments start closing.
For luxury apartments, New York is the new hot market for global buyers. “We are just swamped,” says Elizabeth L. Sample, a senior global real-estate adviser and associate broker for Sotheby’s International Realty. “Normally, we’re in the Hamptons in the summer. But all of August, we were here with foreign buyers. We’re working with 10 different foreign buyers right now.”
When asked where they were coming from, Ms. Sample rattled off a mile-long list that started with an “influx of people from London,” along with buyers from Brazil and Israel. “The Chinese are back and so are the Japanese. They’ve been in and out of the market and they’re more prominent now,” she notes. There are also “many princes and kings” from the Middle East looking to buy and, she says with a flourish, “We still have the Russians.”
Manhattan has always attracted its fair share of foreign buyers. In the 1980s, for instance, Japanese investors snapped up small studios and one-bedroom apartments, seeking the steady income from renters.
But today’s rich globe-trotters, say analysts, are looking for something else. First, many want for a safe place to park their assets. They want an investment that, over time, is not likely to lose its value and may, in fact, become more valuable. At 432 Park Avenue, a mystery buyer paid a reported $95 million for an 8,255-square-foot apartment. At more than $11,500 a square foot, the apartment does not include a large storage unit in the basement (an additional $190,000) or one of the 76-square-foot wine cellars also available to buyers ($320,000).
Designed by Rafael Viñoly, 432 Park will be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere when it is completed, soaring nearly 1,400 feet above Midtown. Sales started this year and so far, about 50 percent of the building is in contract. One-third of the buyers have come from overseas, primarily Britain, South America, China, the Middle East and Russia.
In TriBeCa, where 56 Leonard Street is slowly rising and will eventually ascend 60 stories, only about 10 percent of the 145 apartments that have been sold went to foreign buyers, said one of the building’s developers, Izak Senbahar.
“I think that the international people didn’t have the time,” to buy into the building, Mr. Senbahar said, adding that it was 92 percent sold in just seven months. But it was not for lack of trying. “I remember one French person really buying on the phone because he thought it was going to be too late to get the unit he wanted,” Mr. Senbahar said.
Nicknamed the “Jenga building” for its jagged steel-and-glass design that resembles the wooden tower game, 56 Leonard has a penthouse on the 60th floor that went to what has only been described as a “New York-based hedge fund manager” for $47 million. That stood as a record price for downtown until just recently, when a full-floor penthouse apartment in the Walker Tower, a condominium in Chelsea, went into contract for $50 million.
For more than a decade, Gary Barnett, a former diamond trader who, as the head of Extell Development, built the W Hotel in Times Square, had carefully assembled his site on West 57th near Carnegie Hall. He bought various buildings and began acquiring the corresponding air rights, all with an eye toward building one of the city’s tallest luxury residential towers.
He shifted on his feet as he stood in the living room of a finished model apartment on the 41st floor of One57 that costs $18.75 million, or less than $6,000 a square foot. (“As these things go, it’s a great price,” he says.)
One57, which is scheduled to open in December, is now more than 70 percent sold. Standing 1,004 feet, One57 will be the highest residential tower in the city until 432 Park is finished.
Like most other high-end skyscrapers, One57 is selling the lifestyle of the globe-trotting chief executive or hedge fund manager. World-famous architect? Check — Christian de Portzamparc. High-end Miele appliances? Check. Private yoga studio and performance room? Check and check. Unfortunately, the world’s billionaires will have to swim laps in the building’s 75-foot indoor swimming pool with the tourists staying at the Park Hyatt hotel, which will occupy the first 30 floors of the building when it opens the middle of next year.
“There aren’t going to be many buildings like this that even can be built. Because how many spots can you find that will deliver this kind of view?” Mr. Barnett asked, as he nodded to the New York City vistas.
Well, actually, just down the street, on 57th and Broadway. That is where Mr. Barnett is already at work on his next project: a luxury tower that, if he sticks with preliminary plans, could be the tallest in the city, soaring more than 1,400 feet into the sky.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 11, 2013
An article last Monday about record sales prices for luxury apartments in New York City misidentified the property that holds the record price for downtown. It is a full-floor penthouse apartment in the Walker Tower in Chelsea that recently sold for $50 million — not a penthouse on the 60th floor of 56 Leonard, which was the previous record-holder when it sold for $47 million. The error was repeated in an accompanying picture caption and in a chart. The article also described incorrectly the purchase of a penthouse at 15 Central Park West in 2012. It was bought by a trust set up by the Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev for his daughter Ekaterina and her heirs; it was not bought by Mr. Rybolovlev.
