The Sky's the Limit by Steven Gaines

Author:Steven Gaines [Gaines, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: SOC000000
ISBN: 9780759513884
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2005-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

III

IRONICALLY, THE BUILDING in which Donna Karan was finally buying two apartments was considered “second tier” by real estate insiders, despite its distinctive 1929 art deco exterior designed by architects Simon I. Schwartz and Arthur Gross, a prolific team who met in school. Schwartz and Gross designed more than two hundred buildings in New York, including 912 and 920 Fifth Avenue, two rather luxe co-ops. Yet there is nothing luxe about most of the apartments at 55 Central Park West. Except for the highly prized half a dozen apartments on the top five floors, where a series of dramatic architectural setbacks create cascading terraces, the units have low ceilings and prosaic layouts. Most of the building’s pizzazz is on the outside; the tinted brick that forms its shell is said to comprise forty different shades, beginning with a tan color at the street level and fading to a whitish corn yellow at top, so, it is claimed, it looks as if the sun is always shining on the building. Most strikingly, the building is adorned with elongated art deco fluting as it rises skyward like a spaceship from a Flash Gordon serial, topped by a majestic water tank enclosure accentuated with art deco cornices that look like modernistic stalactites. One of the first tenants was the crooner Rudy Vallée, a superstar of his time, who earned $20,000 a week in the 1920s. The penthouse apartment, in which the master bedroom is in the old water tower with a giant picture window overlooking the city, was once owned by composer Jerry Herman, who wrote Mame there, and later fashion designer Calvin Klein liked the apartment so much that he bought and sold it twice—three years apart—and tripled his original investment. The building is probably best known to the public as the Ghostbusters building, after the 1984 movie that featured the real exterior of the building with its metal deco canopy as the “home of all supernatural evil in Manhattan,” as one character puts it. “In other words, it’s spook central!”

One detail that made Donna Karan’s purchase of the apartment at 55 Central Park West particularly complicated—and unusual—was that the seller was Linda Stein’s former husband, Seymour Stein, the legendary music business impresario and founder of Sire Records. Linda met Stein on a blind date, set up by one of the students at the Bronx high school where she taught, not far from where she grew up and where her father owned a kosher catering hall. Her nine-year marriage to Seymour Stein was as exciting and voluble as a roller-coaster ride. He discovered and nurtured some of the most enduring and prestigious acts in pop music history, including Madonna, the Talking Heads, and k.d. lang. Indeed, part of Linda Stein’s pedigree as “broker to the stars” is that before she got into real estate, she comanaged the seminal punk rock band the Ramones and signed them to a deal on her former husband’s record label. Although the Steins divorced over twenty years

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