Penthouse Owned by Joan Rivers Sold for $28 Million
The palatial triplex on the Upper East Side that Joan Rivers called home for more than a quarter of a century until her death last year — where she had honed her caustic comedy routines, entertained celebrities, and, by her own telling, even encountered a belligerent ghost — sold for $28 million and was the most expensive closed sale of the week, according to city records.
The property, a penthouse with an adjoining unit, No. 5A, which was occupied by her daughter, Melissa Rivers, and grandson, Edgar Cooper Endicott, is at 1 East 62nd Street, off Fifth Avenue. The buyer was “Middle Eastern royalty” who paid the full asking price, according to a spokeswoman for the listing broker, the Corcoran Group. The monthly carrying costs are $25,337.
The 11-room apartment, with four bedrooms, four and a half baths and five wood-burning fireplaces, encompasses around 5,100 square feet on the top three floors of the seven-story 1903 limestone mansion, which was designed by Horace Trumbauer in neo-French Classic style. The triplex has two terraces totaling 430 square feet that offer Central Park and cityscape views.
The residence had been on and off the market for a few years — in 2009 it was offered for $25 million, and in 2012, for $29.5 million. It was re-listed through the Rosenberg Family Trust in February, five months after the comedian’s death at age 81 following a minor procedure on her vocal cords. Melissa Rivers and Michael D. Karlin, Joan Rivers’s longtime business manager, are listed as the trustees.
Melissa Rivers declined to comment on the sale. But Leighton C. Candler of Corcoran, the listing broker who handled multiple offers on the property for her, noted that “selling was emotional. It would have been far more emotional, though, to live with the memories of her mother there.” Mazhar Raslan of IT Properties brought the buyer, whose identity was shielded by the limited liability company “One E 62nd Street.”
Ms. Rivers, who served as president of the building’s four-member condominium board, bought the apartment in 1988, about a year after the death of her husband, Edgar Rosenberg; she was known in the building as Mrs. Rosenberg, though she jokingly referred to herself as the “scary lady upstairs.”
The fully restored apartment was both showpiece and refuge for Ms. Rivers, who in a 2012 interview described her home’s lavish décor as “Louis XIV meets Fred and Ginger.” A private elevator landing opens to a massive ballroom, where Ms. Rivers gave lavish parties, and an adjoining music room with 23-foot ceilings, gilded antique boiserie paneling and columns, and two fireplaces.
A south-facing terrace is reachable through an adjacent dining room via three French doors and from a wood-paneled library. The upper level has a mezzanine overlooking the music room and the ballroom, and includes the master suite, which has French doors opening to the second terrace. Unit 5A, a separate but contiguous two-bedroom two-bath apartment on the lower level, has a living room with a fireplace and an eat-in kitchen.
“She did an extraordinary job restoring all the rooms,” Ms. Candler said. “It was an enormous wreck — there were stories of pigeons roosting in the ballroom.”
And, according to Ms. Rivers, there were more than lingering pigeons. In a 2009 episode of “Celebrity Ghost Stories,” Ms. Rivers said she brought in a voodoo priestess shortly after moving in to help clear out a bothersome ghost she called “Mrs. Spencer,” supposedly a former resident.
Copyright © 2015 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times.
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