Macy\'d5s Exec Scores Late Poet Laureate\'d5s Village Condo for $2.6 M.

The New York Observer, June 19th, 2007

Nothing could be gloomier or more poignant than the extinction of Greenwich Village poets. But it’s been decades since W.H. Auden strolled the streets in his slippers here; now the late Pulitzer Prize–winner Stanley Kunitz’s apartment has been sold to a department-store executive.

According to city records, his four-bedroom condo in the mulishly modern Butterfield House condominium at 37 West 12th Street went to Macy’s vice chair Janet Grove. The price was $2.6 million, a few hundred thousand dollars over the asking price.

“When I first entered the apartment, clearly there was a lifetime of memorabilia, books. Clearly, someone who lived a full life lived in this property,” said Corcoran Group senior vice president Sharon Held, who listed the apartment with Maria Manuche. Kunitz, a two-time U.S. poet laureate, died last year at 100.

He wrote without pretension or clumsiness, often about his father’s suicide. “I’m curious,” he had said. “I’m active. I garden and I write and I drink martinis.” (Why didn’t Kunitz win quick fame? “It’s strange,” Auden said, “but give him time.”)

The apartment’s 24-foot-long living room, two of the bedrooms and a solarium looked south on a “viewing garden”—which, cruelly, is closed off. As recompense, Kunitz cultivated his own seaside summer landscape on Cape Cod.

Were his Village buyers attracted to the apartment’s legacy? “No, I think they were attracted mainly because it’s very hard to find a true four-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village,” Ms. Held said, “and certainly along this area in this price range. We actually got into a pretty fierce bidding war.”