House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

by Gross, Michael

  Shanken moved to Fifteen from the Belaire, a Frank Williams–designed, Bill Zeckendorf Jr.–developed condominium, where he’d cobbled together an empire on the thirty-third floor, buying and combining three apartments and owning a fourth, too. A year later in 2006, while Fifteen was still rising, a small plane piloted by New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle flew into the building seven floors above Shanken’s apartment, killing Lidle and a flight instructor. At the time, Arthur Zeckendorf lived on the forty-second floor of the Belaire, just above the highest apartment damaged in the crash. Arthur moved out that night due to smoke, as Shanken likely did, too, if he was home. But both were soon able to return and await the completion of their new apartments.

  Bob Costas was far more famous, so while the NBC sportscaster was revealed as the purchaser of the $11 million apartment 8C, Shanken was never mentioned. Big as Shanken’s apartment was, for the Zeckendorfs, Costas’s purchase mattered more. “It was a validation,” Will says. “He left Time Warner, which felt pretty good because obviously he perceived something. I’ve never met the man, by the way.”

  Divorced in 2001 from the mother of his two children (both now in their twenties), Bob Costas lives with his second wife, Jill Sutton, whom he married the year before paying his Fifteen deposit. Often described as a “marketing guru,” Sutton was from El Paso, Illinois, went to Illinois State, was named a 1987 Illinois Junior Miss, started out as a weekend broadcaster and segued into TV production jobs at Fox and NBC. She met Costas at the Super Bowl in 1998 and is said to have reconnected with him several years later. Despite his fame, they live quietly. And despite his profession reporting on others, Costas shows no inclination to have others report on him. “It’s a nice building,” he says through an NBC spokesman. “We enjoy living there. That sums up everything I’d like to say.”

  Also living quietly at 15CPW is a fashion-world figure whose very life has been something of a mystery ever since she was born. Tyler Alexandra Gallagher Ellis lives alone in tower apartment 33A, which is owned by the Perry Ellis Management Company LLC, named for the late American fashion designer, who was her father, though she never knew him. Tyler was only a year and a half old when her father died of AIDS on May 30, 1986.

  At the time, the cause of Ellis’s death was a deep, dark secret, at least to the public. His longtime companion, Laughlin Barker, the president of his company, had died that January at age thirty-seven, allegedly of lung cancer. The fashion world had known for months, if not more, that Ellis was dying, too, but AIDS was still a dark and dirty secret, the disease that dared not be named. In months to come, as Ellis visibly declined, his PR person would bristle if the acronym was so much as whispered in her presence.

  Ellis was already infected when Tyler was conceived by artificial insemination. Her mother, Barbara Gallagher, was an old friend of the designer’s. Though it’s been widely speculated that Ellis knew of his condition and fathered the child anyway, Gallagher says that’s not true. “Perry didn’t know,” she says. “He found out right afterward—and he was afraid to tell me. He told me when Tyler was eight months old. He was in denial until the day he died.”

  Gallagher first met Ellis in 1968 through another of his lovers, Robert MacDonald. They’d met at Expo 67 in Montreal, where MacDonald was a media coordinator and she a young assistant working for television’s Ed Sullivan Show. After he nursed her when she came down with measles and she returned the favor by helping him get a US green card, she and MacDonald became close friends. He introduced her to Ellis just before she moved to Los Angeles for a a new job as a television writer for first Carl Reiner, and then Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, and Norman Lear, who would, in a complete coincidence, end up her daughter’s neighbor at 15CPW. After a brief stint as a producer on the then-new Saturday Night Live, Gallagher became a network executive.

  Gallagher had long said she’d like a child even if she never found Mr. Right. “You’re not getting any younger,” MacDonald told her one day. “What about you and Perry?” He proposed that, if she raised a child, Ellis would provide for it. Though Tyler inherited a third of Ellis’s estate, she was raised comfortably but not grandly in LA. “I dressed her in Target her whole life,” Gallagher says. When Tyler went to Boston University, Barbara bought a pied-à-terre at the Mayfair on Park Avenue. Around the time she decided to refurbish it, another friend of MacDonald’s, a Realtor who lived two blocks north of the Mayflower block, called and told her “the biggest, best apartment building in Manhattan forever” was going up and took her to the sales office. Might as well buy new, Barbara thought, and returned with the officer of Tyler’s trust, which agreed to pay $10.997 million for apartment 30A in February 2006. Barbara sold the Mayfair apartment, moved to the Trump International, and watched 15CPW go up. As it rose, the trust spurned an offer of $20 million—all cash—for the apartment. Barbara and Tyler’s broker nudged the offer to $25 million. “Real estate is great,” says Tyler.

  When it was time to move in, Tyler didn’t want to live in New York. “Mom, you live there,” she said. Then Tyler took another look, said, “I kind of like this,” and Barbara moved out. Decorating took a year. Tyler had to pay for it and went through her budget, so “it’s still not done,” says Barbara. But Tyler earns her own money; she has started Tyler Alexandra, a luxury handbag line. “She’s getting even” for those Target clothes, says Barbara.

  Though she has no direct memory of her father, Perry Ellis is alive to Tyler and she has kept him alive: her handbag line’s handwritten logo is from an envelope he addressed to her on her first birthday. “I grew up in Los Angeles, and my mom kept me away from the fashion scene—his world,” Tyler says. “But I spoke weekly with his mother and stepfather and visited them in Virginia a couple times a year throughout my childhood. Obviously my mom told me stories about him and saved some of his designs for me, but it wasn’t until I began Tyler Alexandra that I really felt his presence. I have been contacted by many of his peers, who have shared their personal stories about my father with me. . . . These stories have given me a real sense of who he was and what a typical day in the life of Perry Ellis was. And we are very similar! Put it this way: he would not have had me dressed in Target.”

  Ellis often travels for work, “and also, I’m younger than most people who live here,” she says, so she doesn’t know her neighbors. But she uses the gym and loves the restaurant “and room service doesn’t hurt.” Only once has she been discomfited by living in what she calls “a closed community” of the rich and powerful, the night plainclothes security men “freaked out” when she showed up at the restaurant with friends wearing backpacks. Israel’s minister of defense was inside, dining with one of her neighbors. “I had no idea who he was,” she says. Ellis has recognized some of the better-known faces, such as Denzel Washington, whose wife, Pauletta, an actress and concert pianist, is often in the gym when Ellis exercises. “She’s the nicest,” Ellis says.

  Washington’s arrival on the 15CPW scene was another crucial moment in the creation of the building’s image. He signed his contract to buy 14C for just over $13 million on April 27, 2006—becoming the first world-class entertainer in the building. It didn’t hurt Fifteen’s image that he was also a prominent African-American (who would thus have had two strikes against him had he tried to buy a home in a typical co-op). This time, there was no delay in the news getting out. Within a week, the Wall Street Journal’s Private Properties column led with the story, which was sourced to “people familiar with the deal.”

  Washington, a workaholic actor whose primary residence is in the foothills above Beverly Hills, bought his New York apartment through an LLC called 14C Park. “He’d been looking,” says Michael Bolla, his Realtor. “We walked into the showroom and within five minutes, he said, ‘This is it.’ ” Several people in the Zeckendorf camp say that Bolla was a tough negotiator who insisted that Washington not pay full price, so in exchange for a small discount, the developers were given permission to publicize his purc
hase. “We never authorized that,” Bolla insists, but he adds that Washington didn’t mind. “He’s accustomed to it. He didn’t care.” The actor’s request to move some plumbing lines was granted, and public records indicate that he did get a small discount.

  Washington’s easygoing nature is evident in his modesty about his accomplished three-plus-decades-long career. “I’m just a working actor,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2012. “I’m still not famous, as far as I’m concerned. The fame part, other than getting a reservation at a restaurant . . . I’m just a regular guy.” Asked what he does when people recognize him in restaurants, he joked, “I just slap the shit out of them.” Later in the same interview, he hinted that proximity to Broadway might have inspired his purchase of a New York apartment. “I love the stage,” he said. “In the last ten years, I’ve gone back to Broadway twice now. I’m going back next year. I’d go off-Broadway in a minute, and fortunately I’m independently wealthy. I mean, I got enough money is what I’m saying. I got a couple of dollars!”

  The Denzel moment gave the Zeckendorfs the chance to brag about more than bagging an Oscar winner. The Journal’s item on Washington included a tidbit aimed at competing developers: after nine months of selling, two-thirds of the 15CPW apartments were in contract, a hurdle the paper noted had taken far longer to achieve at Time Warner. Sales had passed the billion-dollar mark, and that magic number—which the hype machine claimed was a North American record—was deemed worthy of celebration, so late in June, the Zeckendorfs took over the Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center for what they called their Billion Dollar Bash, with a guest list limited to purchasers with signed contracts, brokers, and press. Prospective buyers were pointedly left on the outside looking in.

  The big-name apartment buyers didn’t show that time, but it hardly mattered. Though the party celebrated a monetary milestone, 15CPW was no longer just a money building; now it had celebrity cachet. Two days later, it got even more, when Braden Keil at the New York Post let the world know that, three weeks earlier, Gordon Sumner, the musician also known as Sting, had agreed to pay just under $27 million for apartment 16B, the duplex next door to Lloyd Blankfein’s, adding it to a collection of homes that has included a Tudor manor house in Wiltshire, a farmhouse once owned by the family of the poet William Wordsworth, a two-hundred-acre estate in Tuscany, and a Malibu mansion purchased from the former star of Dallas, Larry Hagman. Sting’s latest purchase was no less impressive. He got the last 15CPW penthouse.

  Keil pointed out that Sting, the teacher-turned-rock-star with the Police, his wife, Trudie Styler, and their four children wouldn’t have far to move, since they already owned a duplex co-op a few blocks north at 88 Central Park West. Purchased from fellow songsmith Billy Joel and his then-wife Christie Brinkley for $4.8 million in 1989, that sixteen-room apartment was on the far less desirable second and third floors, but did boast twenty-eight windows and twenty-three closets. Listed for almost $25 million right after the couple first bought their new duplex, it finally sold for $17.75 million in summer 2010.

  Truth be told, 15CPW attracted far more glamour-industry executives than glamorous celebrities. Many of them are based elsewhere but can afford luxurious second homes. In rapid succession in fall 2006, Los Angeles–based Norman Lear, the legendary television producer, bought the sky-high 38B for $10.2 million; one of Lear’s closest friends, Alan Horn, the president of Warner Bros. (he’d later become chairman of Walt Disney Studios) and husband of the eighties fashion model and actress Cindy Harrell, bought the unit just below for $9.7 million; Leslie Wexner, founder and chairman of the Columbus, Ohio–based Limited stores, who has kept a foothold in New York since opening a store there in the late 1980s, bought 10B for $13.339 million; and Ed Snider, the chairman of Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Philadelphia Flyers, that city’s Wells Fargo Center, and a regional sports network, dropped about $7.5 million for the apartment directly below Horn’s on the thirty-sixth floor.

  “My wife is totally responsible for our being here,” says Lear, “but everything I care about seems to be over here” on the West Side. “Theater, theater, theater. One of the great joys of New York.” So when his third wife, Lyn, heard about Fifteen from friends she won’t name, she brought him to see the building, just blocks away from the homes of two of Lear’s daughters, who both live on Central Park West, and proposed it be their second home.

  “The only decision I made,” says Lear, came after the then-eighty-four-year-old rode the construction hoist to the top of the unfinished tower. “We looked at the floor below,” he says, “but its ceilings were a foot lower. I said let’s do the higher ceilings.”

  They ended up doing more than that. “We changed almost everything,” turning their foyer, dining room, and living room into a single open space, Lyn Lear says, “and were disturbed that we had to [buy] the apartment as Stern designed it and then tear it down and redo it to our liking, but that was the way it was.” Then, in February 2009, before the Lears moved in, there was a leak from Daniel and Margaret Loeb’s penthouse above, which was also still under renovation. A pipe in an exterior wall froze and burst.

  American International, Rod Martin’s insurance company, which had issued policies covering both the Lear and the Loeb apartments, paid $375,000 to the Lears and more than $779,000 to the Loebs’ LLC, Panorama on the Park, to settle damage claims, then filed suit against several of the Loebs’ renovation contractors, the condo partnership, the builder, and Brown Harris Stevens, which had taken over management of the building when it opened—attempting to affix blame for the leak.

  By fall 2006, a year after 15CPW first went on sale, it was three-quarters sold, and Forbes reported the building had broken a North American record with $1.4 billion in signed contracts. Prices then ranged from $2,000 to $6,000 per square foot, with an average of $3,300. Despite (or perhaps because of) those record-setting numbers, there were still eager buyers as the Zeckendorfs began releasing the last trophies, having raised their prices substantially. By February 2007, all that remained were “a few leftovers,” says a sales team member. “But people were still flying in, so we put them on a list and said we’d be in touch.”

  That was when gossip about who planned to live there was overtaken by even more titillating chatter, the astonishing sums the apartments would trade for in the days and years to come. For the truth was that Fifteen’s biggest celebrity names, Gordon, Washington, Costas, and Sting, were as understated as the building they’d chosen to share. They were tasteful, one might even say boring, celebrities. And something was brewing at 15CPW that wasn’t boring at all.

  Flipping, or selling an apartment for a profit without ever occupying it and sometimes before actually owning it, became a defining Fifteen phenomenon. The world economy was reeling, banks and insurance companies teetering on the edge of insolvency, corporations declaring bankruptcy at unprecedented rates, jobs disappearing, the stock market plunging, retirement funds vaporizing, and home values plummeting, but Fifteen Central Park West would prove to be the exception to all those rules. Armed with their investment savvy and their stockpiles of cash, those fortunate to buy the Fifteen dream before it was an obvious sure thing won big, again proving the wisdom of the old cliché that the rich get richer.

  In most new condominiums, purchasers are barred from listing or advertising their apartments before closing because the developers don’t want buyers competing with them and speculating with their product. They want a velvet rope outside their club—at least until they’ve cashed out. The Zeckendorfs went further to discourage investors: their offering included a rule limiting rentals to one year; renters then have to get a new approval from the condo board. They also tried to limit purchasers to a single apartment (though they were welcome to buy staff and guest suites), succeeding in all but a few cases.

  Behind the scenes, though, a gray market for Fifteen apartments blossomed, says real estate investment banker John Fowler. Another third-generation member of a real estate family, Fo
wler had a fascination with the Zeckendorfs that dated back to his reading Big Bill’s autobiography at the beginning of his career. Late in 2005, while renting an apartment at Time Warner, he made an appointment to visit the 15CPW sales office. “One thing led to another,” he says, and he put down a deposit on apartment 32B, but almost immediately “I wanted a better unit.” In January 2006 Fowler was allowed to transfer his deposit to the larger 32A. “I had every intention of moving in,” he continues. He hired an architect and even bought furniture, but grew frustrated, early in 2008, because gaining access to the apartment before he closed was “a pain in the ass,” he says.

  His 15CPW salesperson had already tried to tempt him to sell. She says, “Prices kept going up and up and up, and I’d see him or call him and say, ‘Y’know, I could sell it for twelve million dollars.’ ‘No, not interested.’ Two months later, fourteen. ‘Yeah, tell me when it’s sixteen or seventeen.’ I called back: ‘Sixteen.’ He said, ‘Why not eighteen?’ There’s always that greed factor, and I sold it for eighteen and he didn’t move in.”

  Meantime, Arthur and Edward Falcone, two of three brothers who co-own a multibillion-dollar real estate company in Boca Raton, Florida, had decided to flip 35A above him—apparently without the Zeckendorfs’ knowledge—and a bidding war for it had broken out. Peter Simon, a British fashion tycoon “came in second,” Fowler says, and “was desperate” to get into Fifteen. The founder of Monsoon, a store chain, Simon was fortunate. “They’d told me no flips,” but decided to allow a few, for reasons unknown, Fowler continues, though he had to pay “several hundred thousand dollars” for the privilege. Flying under the radar as Corolana Property Holdings of the British Virgin Islands and Liechtenstein, Simon signed a contract agreeing that, on closing, he’d pay the Zeckendorfs their $10 million–plus and Fowler another $7 million–plus for his place. Fowler used some of his profit of about $4 million to rent 25F in the rear of the tower because “I still wanted to live there,” he says. What surprised him the most was “that the über-rich would want to live with the not-so-rich. I’ve been blessed, but these people just make my head spin.”