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The New York Times

Apartment for Sale, Tchotchkes Optional

By: Sarah Kershaw. Photos by Fred. R. Conrad.
Published: 2/27/2011Source: The New York Times

It is somewhat surprising, after visiting an apartment for sale on the Upper East Side, to learn that it has 11 rooms and 6,000 square feet. That is because the rooms are filled — and we are talking packed — with hundreds and hundreds of figurative sculptures. And clocks, hundreds of clocks.

 

Perhaps the clocks would explain why the man who owned the place, Morton Swinsky, a bond trader and Broadway producer who collaborated on nine Tony Award-winning plays, including “Guys and Dolls,” “Chicago” and “Billy Elliot,” was always early, said his daughter, Karen Swinsky.

 

A woodworker visited every Friday to help Mr. Swinsky, who died of prostate cancer last June, place new pieces in the apartment. His collection includes an 800-pound sculpture by the artist Gwen Marcus, several coffee urns bought from Tavern on the Green when it closed, and a rhinoceros head made of yellow matchsticks. There are also likenesses of monkeys, alligators, zebras, Ronald Reagan, Bernard L. Madoff, Mr. Swinsky himself, and garudas — large, mythical birdlike creatures — many, many garudas.

 

“If you think there are 20 of something,” Ms. Swinsky said, “there are probably 40.”

 

Soap in each of the four and a half bathrooms is literally hand soap, cast in the shape of tiny hands.

 

“Everybody knew Dad was quite different,” said Ms. Swinsky, who along with her sister, Dana Swinsky Cantelmo, is selling the apartment, a duplex on 70th Street near Madison Avenue. It will go on the market on Monday for $10.2 million.

 

The two sisters have spent months using flashlights and magnifying glasses to find the names of the artists on the work that Mr. Swinsky bought or commissioned over the years.

 

Christie’s expects to offer 350 of his pieces at auction, said Jamie Krass, the auction house’s director of 20th-century art and photographs. Mr. Swinsky, having made about 300 bids at the auction house over the years, bought about 160 items from Christie’s, worth about $1.8 million, Mr. Krass said.

 

Sharon E. Baum of the Corcoran Group, who is handling the listing with Heather Johnson Sargent, acknowledged that buyers might have a hard time imagining what the space would look like without all the art. But she said Mr. Swinsky’s daughters did not want to wait to have it cleared out and miss a chance to sell in the spring market.

 

Buyers are welcome to buy anything in the apartment, Ms. Baum said, adding, “Everything is up for discussion.”

 

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Copyright © 2011 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.  Photos should be credited as follows: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times. 

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