The New York Observer, June 26th, 2007
If you’ve recently bought David Geffen’s duplex penthouse at 810 Fifth Avenue for $37.5 million, but you’ve also just made $1.9 billion for a day’s work, maybe you might feel financially secure enough to hold on to your older properties.
But Pete Peterson, the senior chairman and co-founder of the newly public Blackstone Group, apparently thinks otherwise. According to a source, three top city brokerages—Brown Harris Stevens, Stribling & Associates and Sotheby’s International Realty—are pricing his 11th-floor apartment at River House, a hilariously posh iron-gated co-op on East 52nd Street.
The cost of the four-bedroom spread will probably be pinned between $9 and $10 million.
“The owner is an investment banker, so he’s thinking about it like putting several bankers on one project, and letting them duke it out,†said a high-ranking agent at one of those brokerages.
But, according to the brokerage database ROLEX, Mr. Peterson hasn’t officially listed the place yet, and the executive couldn’t be reached through Blackstone. So which brokerage will eventually get the listing? “It could be one of them, two of them, three of them,†the top agent said.
Mr. Peterson might want to move on from River House on account of a saucy amateur video filmed there, which promoted his daughter Holly’s summer novel The Manny. A New York Times report mentioned a “dwarf†yodeling in front of the apartment’s floor-to-ceiling Richard Diebenkorn canvas, while socialite Tinsley Mortimer (compensated with a snakeskin purse) discussed the manny’s “sweet ass†out on the terrace.
Mr. Peterson’s building does not like entertainers, amateur or otherwise: Diane Keaton and Joan Crawford have famously been spurned by the board. On the one hand, he cleared the air through The New Yorker by saying he wouldn’t have lent his co-op to his daughter had he known about the film.
On the other, it might still be embarrassing to bump into anti-Manny co-op neighbors like Henry Kissinger—Secretary of State when Mr. Peterson was Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce. If those bounteous brokers pin down the right price, maybe the Blackstone man will be spending more time in Mr. Geffen’s old penthouse?
