Dasmarka Real Estate

4.
Young and telegenic real estate agents Madison Hildebrand and Chad Rogers from Million Dollar Listing better watch their pretty back because there's a new real estate reality show coming to Tinseltown. According to the Hollywood Reporter (via Curbed) the peeps at HGTV plan to spin off their successful Selling New York program and bring it to Los Angeles where it will be called, natch, Selling Los Angeles.

Like with the New York City version, the program will highlight the promotion of property listed and sold by three as yet unnamed boo-teek real estate agencies. Anyone what to clue Your Mama in on which agents and brokers are trying to get themselves up on the tee-vee?

5.
Not having had much luck selling her College Grove, TN farm the regular way, Grammy winning singer/songwriter Sheryl Crow opted to put her 150-ish acre spread up for auction with a current minimum bid price of $1,000,000. There's even a website and everything.

The bidding process for Miz Crow's Cross Creek Farm has already started and ends at 6pm on November 23rd, 2010.

Your Mama dissed and discussed Miz Crow's farm and its 10,264 square foot mansion in May of 2010 when it was officially listed with a sticker price of $7,500,000.

6.
According to the delightful Chloe Malle at the New York Observer, some wildly wealthy person has snatched up two adjacent condos at the Time Warner Center listed for a mouth-drying combined asking price of $57,500,000. The buyer of both apartments, a sprawling simplex and a slightly smaller doo-plex, was reported to be "an unnamed Russian tycoon" whose intent is probably to use the palatial pad as pied a terre.

It just goes to prove if you've got a billion bucks and you lose half of it, you're still filthy, stinking rich and have the financial wherewithal to lay our blood curdling sums of money for homes likely to only get used, at most, a few months of the year.

The smaller doo-plex, on the 74th and 75th floors, measures approximately 3,500 square feet and features 3 bedrooms, 5.5 poopers, a 40-some foot long living/dining room with unobstructed city views and a private elevator to lift all the people too damn lazy to climb one lousy flight of stairs. The apartment was last listed at $18,450,000 and reportedly went to contract for $15,700,000.

The larger, 75th floor simplex sprawler was last listed with a eyeball popping price tag of $34,950,000. If the children do the math as Your Mama did, you'll see that for some reason there was a $4,000,000 premium placed on purchasing the units together. We're not sure why someone would even consider paying four million clams more to acquire the condos together when they could simply do two separate deals and save themselves a considerable amount of money, millions actually.

Anyhoo, the 4,454 square foot apartment is being sold by "fortune telling phony" Steven Feder who made much of his money on the famous and infamous Miss Cleo pay-per-call psychic service where sad and lonely people paid big bucks to have some sassy ladee with a bad Jamaican accent offer wisdom and guidance over the telephone.

Mister Feder and his man-friend Lou Thomas Trosclair purchased the 5 bedroom and 6.5 pooper combined unit residence in January of 2008 for $24,480,000. The glassy aerie has a 40-some foot long living/dining room, a separate family room, a dee-luxe but windowless eat-in kitchen plus a second smaller kitchen at the rear of the apartment, and a master bedroom with his and his terliting facilities and a closet lined dressing area plus a walk-in closet.

The two apartments together measure a whopping 8,000-ish square feet and, according to Streeteasy, the combined common charges and taxes run an astounding $26,233 per month.. Unless a radical re-working of the floor plan occurs, by Your Mama's count there are a total of 8 bedrooms, 11 full and 2 half poopers, 3 kitchens, and a couple dozen closets.

This isn't the first time at the Time Warner Center Real Estate Rodeo for Misters Feder and Trosclair. In September of 2006, the two gays shelled out $9,750,000 to buy a 3,050 square foot apartment on the 65th floor of the south tower. They bought the condo from Puerto Rican pop star Ricky Martin who also happens to be gay but we doubt that was a factor in anything.

Now children, sit down because Your Mama is going to blow your real estate mind here: Misters Feder and Trosclair flipped the apartment just one year later. They sold to a neighbor for–are your ready for this?–$15,850,000. A few quick flicks of the well worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals that's a heart stopping and almost unimaginable $6,100,000 profit in just one year of ownership.

Remember those real estate salad days folks? They seem so far back in the rear view mirror now, don't they?

Listen up chickens because Your Mama's going to speak the truth you here: Pickins are a bit slim in the celebrity real estate game right now; At least they are for us. We do have a few things lined up but nothing that's making our heart sing and fingers tingle. These things happen. There's ebb, there's flow and we are at the mercy of the thinning amount of 411 in our Easter Basket.

In light of the current state of things and because Your Mama's Momma will be visitin' over the weekend, we're going to switch things up a little bit. Normally we save up the Real Estate Mish-Mash until the weekend, but we're going to get bizzy with it today, Thursday.

Buckle up them safety belts, babies, because it's going to be a bumpy ride for some of y'all.

1.
Dirty, nasty, wicked, razor sharp, and fuh-nee drag queen Jackie Beat recently opened the blood red front door to her campy, colorful and collection-filled Highland Park, CA home for the Los Angeles Times.

Hunnies, trust Your Mama on this, it's too good to be missed. We're sure some of you more traditional types will piss and moan and call Miss Beat's residence a tranny hot mess; And, it kind of is. But, children, it's a good tranny hot mess.

A ceramic ram with gold hooves as the dining room centerpiece? A framed photo of the cast of The Golden Girls? Ceramic owls? Yes, she did, people, because bee-hawtcha Beat plays that way. We don't care whatch'all think or how high-pitched your shriek, Your Mama would much rather look at a cockamamie but deeply personal home like Miss Beat's big bag of decorative bagatelles than all these gigantic and generic faux-Tuscan McMansion too deeply serious about impressing the guests with their hangar sized entrance halls, cook's kitchens and poopers slathered in travertine. Okaaay?

2.
While Jackie Beat was giving the grand tour of her abode on the West Coast, on the East Coast ceramicist and lifestyle guru Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan–who happens to be, among other amazing things, the Creative Director at Barneys–opened the doors to their zany Palm Beach on acid style Greenwich Village abode to the Wall Street Journal.

Like Miss Beat's abode, this too is kinda fantastic in its own way. We marvel at Mister Adler's fearless and willy-nilly approach to color, pattern and "wink-wink" geometric forms. We recognize that not every person will want a bronze boot up in their fireplace (or whatever that is) and we understand that there's a childlike quality to the day-core that many will find off-putting. But, seriously kids, Your Mama will happily take this crazy eclectium where you gotta wear your best damn sunglasses just to sit in the living room over a bunch of brand new beige and brown things all tarted up and carved up to look like antiques and stuck up into a tract development where every 4th house has the same floor plan.

3.
The folks at online real estate juggernaut Zillow compiled a detailed list of the home of 10 of the richest and most successful "tech tycoons" in the United States. They range from Facebook multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerbergs modest Palo Alto, CA rental house to the architectural extravaganza of Larry Ellison's 23-acre Japanese tea garden inspired compound in Woodside, CA.

It's worth a look if any of y'all ever wondered what happens to all the money spent on the latest and greatest gadgets and all the hours trolling around Facebook when you're supposed to be working.

Check back later for some additional real estate tidbits and morsels.

And remember, iffin any of The Children know something they might want to discreetly pass along, y'all should give Your Mama a ringy-dingy on the email right quick.

SELLER: Sally Hershberger
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $5,500,000
SIZE: 3,645 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Back in the golden olden days–that would be March of 2007–Your Mama discussed the Beverly Hills, CA house of super successful scissor sister Sally Hershberger. At that time the tress tycoon's low and sleek west coast residence was listed with an astonishing price tag of $6,500,000.

The fully renovated, updated and upgraded 1960s modern was only on the (open) market for a few months before it vanished. But it's back, butter beans, only this time with a new and lower but still back breaking sticker price of $5,500,000.

Born into a substantial Kansas oil fortune, Miss Hershberger took to doing hair at an early age. While her list of accomplishments as a honcho of high-end hair is long, her claim to fame is that she's the She-rah of the Shag. Miss Hershberger, who herself sports a version of her signature shag style, is the woman responsible for the precisely tussled and perfectly choppy do that arguably made Meg Ryan's trademark hair do more famous then she ever was. In addition to Miz Ryan, Miss Hershberger boasts a bevy of past and present celeb clients include Kate Moss, Sandra Bernhard, Jane Fonda, Calista Flockhart, Vera Wang, and Annie Liebovitz who–if y'all will allow Your Mama to be catty for a moment–really shouldn't be spending more than six bucks to have her hair cut since she's constantly on the precipice of bankruptcy.

The notoriously aloof Miss Hershberger, a slim, rough and tumble type of gal not known for having a very pleasant or chatty chair side manner, took the tonsorial world by storm in 2003 when she opened an eponymous (and unmarked) salon in New York City's newly gentrified Meatpacking District and charged $600 for a damn haircut. It wasn't long before fellow Meatpacking District celebrity hair stylist Orlando Pita had the chutzpah–or, some will say, audacity–to up the price of his coiffuring services to $800. Miss Hershberger soon followed suit and raised the cost of one of her hair clips to $800. And, cinnamon sticks, people pay it, willingly and frequently. If forking over $800 just to have your hair snipped and styled seems a bit steep–and let's be honest, chickens, it's more than most people in this good ol' U.S. of A. pay in rent every month–Miss Hershberger developed an affordable line of hair care products sold at mass retailers such as Walgreens.

While New York-based, Miss Hershberger still owns a salon space in Los Angeles, which happens to be in the very same building as the offices of decorating dervish Kelly Wearstler. In addition to the above mentioned unmarked Meatpacking District space, she has a second New York City hair care emporiums for all the uptown ladeez located on two floors of a posh townhouse on East 71st Street.

Anyhoo, property records reveal that Miss Hershberger bought her Beverly Hills home in January of 2004 for $2,400,000. Given the jacked up asking price, Your Mama has to assume that she spent boo-coo bucks working this place over and fixing every broken doohickey and thingamabob.

Listing information shows the single story house, fronted by a gated motor court, measures a sizable but hardly huge 3,645 square feet. The three bedrooms and five poopers including the master suite at the rear of the residence that includes built-in bookshelves, fireplace, large sepia toned photograph over the bed that shows a preening and shiny horse, and a large private pooper with a spa tub sunk in to the terrazzo floors and a glass box shower. A full wall of frameless floor to ceiling glazing completely exposes the bathroom to a courtyard area with a shallow, rectilinear and minimalist lily pond. While this is all very theatrical in photos, in practice things could get a bit dicey iffin yer in the shower or settin' on the terlit and around the corner comes the unsuspecting gardener looking to trim the bushes and mow the lawn. Perhaps these windows have some of that new-fangled technology that frosts them over at the flip of a switch.

The ample, prairie-like main living space, with its vast expanse of eggshell colored terrazzo floors, includes a dining area and several sitting groups, one of which has a minimalist firebox and wood storage box trimmed with polished stainless steel and chocolate and caramel colored marble accents. A sensually curving wall of floor to ceiling glass panels obliterates any visual separation between the living room and the terrazzo terrace that surrounds the small but adequate, abstract shaped swimming pool. Panoramic views, the kind that wealthy Angelenos pay multi-millions to wake up to–stretch dramatically from the Hollywood Hills all the way to–on a clear day–the Pacific Ocean.

In the dining room, Your Mama is all bugged-eyed and bewitched over the half dozen luh-shus tri-legged Hans Wegner Heart Chairs that surround a rustic tressel-style table that may or may not be a $65,000 George Nakashima Frenchman's Cove table. We are not so bugged-eyed or bewitched by the photograph–or maybe it's a painting–on the wall behind the dee-voon dining room table. The painting–or photo or whatever–depicts a couple of virile-looking, wild-maned horses rubbing noses in a moment of private horse passion. Iffin Your Mama is being honest, and we always are, we're not sure what to make of Miss Hershberger's confusing affinity for equine imagery.

A sliver skylight sends soft light down a geometrically textured matte-finish wall in the kitchen juxtaposed against glistening white flat front cabinets that both hide the refrigerator and hold an array of high grade stainless steel appliances. The stone counter top of the work island cantilevers over the base to create a bantam breakfast bar just big enough to two to sip coffee and eat grapefruit.

Additional living areas, according to listing information, include a den, library, "bonus room," exercise room, office and a media/music room. Where not sure how all that fits into 3,600 square foot, but that's what the listing says. Listing information also states Miss Hershberger's home was recently featured in House & Garden. Maybe it was, but it wasn't recently since that shelter publication, at least the American version, closed its doors and shuttered its windows at the tail end of 2007.

In July of 2010 Miss Hershberger heaved her 905 square foot New York City penthouse pad on the market with a hair raising asking price of $5,900,000. The small but dee-lishus apartment, worked over by architect Brad Floyd and interior designer to the rich and famous Joe d'Urso–he also did up the Hamptons digs of celebrity stylist Lori Goldstein, remains unsold an on the market with its rose-colored five-point-nine million dollar sticker price.

In addition her house in Beverly Hills and her petite penthouse in New York City's West Village neighborhood–both of which are for sale–Miss Hershberger also owns a weekend retreat in the Hamptons, natch. Property records show that in December of 1999 Miss Hershberger paid $930,000 for a waterfront retreat in a woodsy, less expensive area of hoity-toity East Hampton, NY known as The Springs. As far as we know, which is next to nothing, Miss Hershberger's house in The Springs is not for sale.

listing photos: Prudential CA via Redfin

Yesterday Your Mama rambled on and on (and on) about New York City's über exclusive 927 Fifth Avenue building where the estate of recently deceased financier Bruce Wasserstein has put the top half of the billionaire's titanic doo-plex on the market with an elephantine asking price of $26,000,000.

Interest in the 9 room sprawler, according to a new report from the always well-informed Josh Barbanel at the Wall Street Journal, has been so frenzied that the listing brokers quickly shifted real estate gears and opted to schedule for a one day auction.

Brokers with sufficiently interested–and financially qualified–buyers were instructed to submit sealed bid offers by the end of the day yesterday, November 1, 2010. Brokers indicated that the cooperative apartment would go into contract soon after. Your Mama read on the interweb somewhere–we can't remember where now but we'll keep looking–that in order to qualify financially to purchase a spread at 927 Fifth Avenue, a buyer must show 4 times the purchase price of the apartment in liquid assets. That means the buyer of the top floor of Mister Wasserstein's former doo-plex will need to have at least one hundred million clams sitting around in cold hard cash. Ain't life nice for some people?

Mister Barbanel reported that due to the heavy interest in the ritzy residence the deadline might be extended. That sounds like it might be a good thing since the crush of interested parties was so feverish that potential buyers were scheduled in over lapping 45 minute intervals on Monday afternoon with some brokers whining about how they had not been able to get in to view the apartment for or with clients.

Mister Barbanel's briefing included some juicy nuggets of information such as the confirmation that Mister Wasserstein's two full floor units at 927 Fifth Avenue, each around 6,000 square feeet, had indeed been doo-plexed into one vast, mansion sized apartment. In June of 2010, presumably in preparation for sale, permits were issued to close up the staircase that connected the two apartments.

If interest in the 11th floor unit is so great, Your Mama would bet our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly that there is one or maybe even two stinking rich real estate size queens who will try to buy both floors of Mister Wasserstein's former doo-plex. At this point, we don't know if there are plans to sell the 10th floor apartment or if it too is for sale but not on the open market.

BUYER: Amanda Seyfried
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $1,909,218
SIZE: 1,585 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Given that child model turned in-demand young actress Amanda Seyfried is on record as disliking living in Los Angeles, it should come as no surprise that she opted to acquire her first home in downtown New York City.

According to the fine folks at Curbed New York, 24-year old Miss Seyfried–that's pronounced sigh-frid as far as we know–snatched up a condo crib at the recently re-worked Devonshire House building in Greenwich Village that had an asking price of $1,875,00. It don't take any flicking of the well worn beads of Your Mama bejeweled abacus to see that Miss Seyfried must have really wanted the damn apartment because, according to Streeteasy, she paid $1,909,218 for the apartment, otherwise known as more than the asking price.

The pretty pre-war Devonshire House, designed by the pre-war pasha Emery Roth and built in 1928, has long been a rental building of small but not inexpensive apartments. In 2008 the building was sold and the new owners converted the genteel old lady to a new-fangled condominium complex. The 12-story building now includes 24/7 doormen, concierge services, fitness facilities, a playroom for the kiddies, bicycle pen, on-site super, and refrigerated storage in the lobby. The interior spaces were all done over by talented and much-published designer Victoria Hagan, a kind of traditionalist who does a sophisticated, restrained and soft sort of contemporary style. The refreshing–or some might say ruination–of the original, deliciously gloomy and satisfyingly patinated Elizabethan style lobby has been a hot button issue for long time (renting) residents of the building.

Petite, flaxen haired Miss Seyfried, with her bee-stung lips, big ol' crazy wide-set eyes and an unreserved obsession with jeans, started up her ladder of fame as a child model. As a teenager she moved from still photos to soap stories (As the World Turns and All My Children) and in 2004, at the dewy age of 19, she got her big break in the movie bizness with a lead role in Mean Girls opposite the then white-hot teen queen actress Lindsay Lohan. Lawrd hunnies, not to get snarky or maudlin but how bad does that poor, sad, jail-going and frequently rehabbing Lindsay Lohan wish she had Miss Seyfried's career right about now?

Since Mean Girls, Miss Seyfried has successfully careened from the small screen (Big Love, Veronica Mars) to the silver screen (Letters to Juliet, Chloe) and earned herself a spot at the big gurls' table with all the other budding young powerhouse actresses in Tinseltown like January Jones (Mad Men), Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine, Brokeback Mountain) and that sourpuss Kristen Stewart (the Twilight saga).

Along her professional way, according to the interweb, Miss Seyfried has gone steady with with a number of (semi) high-profile and arty-farty young men including actor Emile Hirsch (Milk, Speed Racer, Into the Wild), scruffy musician Jesse Marchant, and British actor Dominic Cooper her co-star in the successful but unfortunate Mama Mia!. Listen, kumquats, Your Mama just doesn't understand why these Hollywood types can't just leave near genius alone because, well, they're always ruining it with their sequels and stoopid adaptations of really good books. Seriously, it just makes Your Mama's blood boil. Anyhoo, that's another beef for another blog really so lets move on to the real estate matter at hand.

Part of Miss Seyfried's self-confessed reason for moving to New York was that she was dating London-based actor Dominic Cooper and New York is hours by plane closer to London than Los Angeles. However, that romance has swirled down the terlit of young love and Miss Seyfried was (allegedly) seen over the weekend–dressed in a dog costume–canoodling with well-formed actor Ryan Phillippe at both Kate Hudson's annual Halloween bash at her Pacific Palisades, CA mansion and later at CAA agent Todd Feldman's party in Bev Hills.

In March of 2010 Miss Seyfried told Vanity Fair magazine she took certain silly romantic comedy roles in order to be able to afford to buy an apartment in New York and the Greenwich Village apartment she suffered through Letters to Juliet to buy measures just over 1,500 square feet and includes two bedrooms and 2 poopers, both of which are, Your Mama is happy to report, blessed with windows.

While we find the location of the laundry facilities off the entrance hall awkward and we're not thrilled with the amount of square footage devoted to the traffic hub between the living and dining room, we do love how the apartment is open from front to back with large windows that allow light to penetrate deep into that dastardly traffic hub.

Typically Your Mama isn't down with kitchens open to dining rooms. We do not want to look at the damn toaster while trying to enjoy a plateful of scallops for dinner nor do we want to have to watch our imperious house gurl Svetlana huff, puff and scrub pots and pans while we're tucking into a dollop home made salted caramel ice cream sitting on a brownie made from a box. You know what we're sayin'? Never the less, the open plan dining room/kitchen works in this apartment, at least in part because the kitchen feels discreetly tucked away from the living room. If there is anything worse than having to listen to the damn dishwasher during desert it's trying to relax in the living room when looking directly at dirty dishes in the sink.

Anyhoo, the two bedrooms are sufficiently separated off separate corridors and share only one short wall, and even that is buffered by a couple of closets. The adequate not not particularly generously sized master bedroom includes a walk in closet and a private pooper with a stand up shower that looks plenty large enough for two or more.

In at least one interview, Miss Seyfried mentioned that she was making some renovations to her new apartment so Your Mama hasn't a clue whether any of Victoria Hagan's handiwork still exists or if it's been ripped out to make way for the work of a nice, gay decorator of Miss Seyfried's choosing.

Whatever the case, it's a lovely first (multi-million dollar) apartment for a sophisticated young actress in a swank location on Greenwich Village Gold Coast. It's not what Your Mama might choose for two million clams. We might have chosen something like this iffin we had the dough left over to make a number of immediate modifications like to do away with that ridiculous glass wall between the master bedroom and pooper. Even though it's a smaller apartment that the one Miss Seyfried chose and not as central of a location, we're a sucker for a small terrace with views of the the Hudson. That's why, as some Real Estates Your Mama knows often say, "There's a lid for every pot, a seat for every ass."

Your Mama's most trusted real estate spies tell us that Miss Seyfried still, whether she likes it or not, maintains a residence in Los Angeles where she rents an admirably modest for a successful actress apartment in a particularly pretty building the Beachwood Canyon neighborhood.

listing photos and floor plan: Stribling New York

Last week, while settin' around sippin' on a gin & tonic contemplating the obviously misguided but somehow still kind of brilliant choice for our friend Hunny Bear to dress up as Justin Bieber for Halloween, we received a typically breviloquent query from another friend and informant Hot Chocolate who asked Your Mama if we knew the dish and dirt on a dee-luxe apartment at the fayn-cee and famous 927 Fifth Avenue building in New York City that recently hit the market with an ear piercing asking price of $26,000,000.

We didn't.

So we did what we always do when our real estate interest gets piqued. We gathered a few provisions (some booze, a nerve pill and a small cache of candy), fired up the interweb and went for a peep and a poke around property records and past reports. Our search was short. The New York Times, much to our delight and chagrin, had already identified the seller of the high floor twenty-six million dollar cooperative apartment as the estate of fairly recently deceased multi-billionaire Bruce Wasserstein, brother of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein and former Chairman and CEO of the white shoe investment banking firm Lazard Frères. Mister Wasserstein went to meet his great investment banker in the sky in October of 2009.

In addition to his duties with Lazard Frères, Mister Wasserstein also owned the eponymous private equity concern Wasserstein & Co. through which he owned, among other bizess entities, New York magazine. At the time Mister Wasserstein bought the magazine in 2004, it was an arguably increasingly stale and quickly becoming irrelevant publication into which some say he breathed new life and renewed success and prominence among the publications and papers that devote themselves to all things New York City.

The slender and handsome limestone clad building at 927 Fifth Avenue, competed in 1917, was designed in the Renaissance Revival style by Warren and Wetmore, the same accomplished architects who designed the architecturally outstanding Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. Built with just one 14-room 6000-ish square foot apartment per floor, the intimately scaled 927 Fifth Avenue offered residents both high luxury and the luxury of privacy. It still does.

Exclusive, expensive and favored by big money Wall Street types, 927 Fifth Avenue is unquestionably one of the very good cooperative buildings that line Fifth Avenue but not, butter beans, one of the very best. Those aristocratic real estate honors, which many will surely decry as outdated and outrageous, belong to cooperative buildings with addresses such as 834, 820, and 1040. For the sake of simplicity, let's just call 927 a solid a-minus building with a board that, despite a couple of past "celebrity" residents, prefers a less attention seeking sort of occupant; They allegedly, many years ago, rejected Barbra Streisand when she sought permission to live up amongst their hoity-toitiness.

While a piece of cake to sort out the identity of the owner of the $26,000,000 apartment currently on the market, Your Mama found it far more difficult to sort out just who owns each of the other 11 full floor apartments at 927 Fifth Avenue. We dug at, pulled on and carefully cajoled the interweb until we were blue in the face and four and a half gin and tonics into the wee hours of the morning. (See how we do for you, children?). Listen here to Your Mama now, carpet tacks, because we're about to impart a cliche nugget of wisdom: Persistence does indeed (sometimes) pay off because after quite a few false starts plus the generous help of a very informative article in Vanity Fair Your Mama finally managed to piece together what we're pretty darn certain is a complete list of the current residents at 927 Fifth Avenue.

Some reports indicate that real estate developer and coop board president Richard Cohen owns the eighth floor apartment at 927 Fifth Avenue. He does not. Our research reveals that Mister Cohen owns the second floor unit, an apartment he shared with tee-vee achor Paula Zahn until sometime in 2007 or 2008 when the long married couple went splitsville. An acrimonious dee-vorce ensued and all sorts of lurid allegations got tossed about and reported in the gossip columns: Miz Zahn (allegedly) told people that her marriage was sexless. Mister Cohen accused Miz Zahn of hooking up with his pal Paul Friburg.

Your Mama don't know anything about those things but we do know that in 2004 Mister Cohen–and by extension Miz Zahn–was embroiled in an even more public brouhaha over the building board's desire to "evict" Pale Male and Lola, a pair of red-tailed hawks who had built a nest atop some of the building's decorative stonework overlooking Central Park. It's a long and sordid story, puppies, the details of which are another story for another day. Suffice to say that Mr. Cohen, as head of the board, successfully led the charge to remove the nest in 2004. Under intense pressure from the public, it wasn't long before the board built the lovebirds a new nest but alas, as far as we know, Pale Male and Lola have yet to produce a single winged shorty in the new nest. The story, should any of y'all be interested gets hashed out in the aforementioned Vanity Fair article.

In May of 2000, shoe purveyor Kenneth Cole and his wife Maria Cuomo-Cole–daughter of former New York State governor Mario Cuomo–paid $11,200,000 for the 3rd floor apartment at 927 Fifth Avenue, which they bought from private investor Laurence Schneider. As the story goes, the couple renovated the apartment but, due to a classic case of the mysterious The Real Estate Fickle, never moved in. The renovated residence was hoisted on to the market and snatched up in 2003 by hedge hog Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital. We were unable to ferret out the sale price but, in case any inquiring minds want to know, in March of 2008 the Cole-Cuomos shelled out $14,500,000 for a cooperative apartment at the seriously stiff lipped One Sutton Place South.

In 1998, former Bankers Trust president and CEO Frank Newman–who received a severance package worth a reported $100,000,000 when he left the financial juggernaut in 1999–bought the 4th floor spread at 927 Fifth for around $9,750,000. He put the 14-room residence back on the market in 2000 for eighteen or $19,000,000. In the spring of 2002 word began to slip-slide down the real estate gossip grapevine that an offer of "almost $13,700,000" offer had been made. The buyer was Goldman Sachs bigwig Thomas B. Walker III. At least one report says the purchase price was $13,000,000. At the time of the sale, the apartment has high ceilings, ballroom sized public spaces with park views, fireplaces and restored gold leaf details.

The fifth floor, as best as Your Mama can surmise from our spin through the interweb, belongs to long time resident Claire Edersheim, the widow of financier Maurits Edersheim, an early and long time employee of the once venerable investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. Mister Edersheim became rich as he climbed the corporate ladder, but in the wake of Drexel's 1990 bankruptcy, he migrated over to Smith Barney.

In addition to an entire house in Scarsdale, NY, in 1970 Mister and Missus Edersheim had the chutzpah to have their pre-war digs at 927 Fifth Avenue completely done over by Brutalist architect Paul Rudolph. The result was a sleek 1970s glam meets a throaty 1930s whisper with lots of suggestively curving walls, shiny surfaces, exotic lighting, Lucite tables, and an army of tufted arm chairs in the corner living room that overlooks Central Park. Numerous and delicious pictures of both projects can be seen here. Since a couple of the photos of the Edershiem's spread at 927 Fifth Avenue show they were taken in the summer of 2010, it appears that precious little has been done to mar the genius of Paul Rudolph.

By a process of elimination we're fairly well certain that leveraged buyout billionaire Marc Rowan and his wife Carolyn own the sixth floor. Like the now deceased Mister Edersheim who lived for many years the apartment below, Mister Rowan is a former big shot banker at Drexel Burnham Lambert. He founded and now heads up some other money making operation called Apollo Management.

Petroleum pasha Robert Belfer and his wife Renée own the seventh floor at 927 Fifth Avenue. Your Mama hears from someone we trust, someone who orbits in the same social milieu as Mister and Missus Belfer, that although Mister Richard Cohen may be the president of the board at 927 Fifth Avenue, it is Mister Belfer who is the gatekeeper. According to our source, the man can single handedly nix a potential buyer with the wee tic of the eye.

Big time philanthropists and patrons of the arts, Mister and Missus Belfer gave enough money to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City that there is now a Robert and Renée Belfer Court for the display of early Greek art. They also handed over enough dough to Harvard University that there exists in their name something called the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Despite his large philanthropic gifts, Mister Belfer may in fact go down in the Wall Street history books for something else entirely. We doubt there will be much sympathy from the common folks who work hard to gas up their car and pay their cell phone bill because the Belfers are still crazy rich, but Mister Belfer was once a major shareholder and director of the doomed energy juggernaut Enron and when that colossal corporate turd swirled down the financial terlit he and his family reportedly lost up to two billion bucks.

Due to it's relatively small size, the turnover rate for apartments at 927 Fifth Avenue tends to bend towards molasses slow. The most recent recorded transaction of a residential unit was in May of 2005 when iconic actress Mary Tyler Moore and her cardiologist huzband Dr. Robert Levine sold their 8th floor unit for $18,o00,000 to asset management fat cat Robert Goldstein and his wife Stephanie.

On the 9th floor, radio and tee-vee tycoon Judith Hernstadt, the ex-wife of former Republican senator from Nevada William "Bill" Hernstadt.

Former Lazard Frères Chairman and CEO Bruce Wasserstein paid around $11,500,000 for the 10th floor unit at 927 Fifth Avnue in 1997. As mentioned previously, he added the 11th floor to his property portfolio in 2001.

The 11th floor unit, the one currently on the market at $26,000,000, was purchased in 1996 for around $10,000,000 by investment banker Richard Gilder. He bought from a ladee named Augusta Berin, the widow of clothing deisgner Harvey Berin who was best known for dressing former first ladee Pat Nixon. In May of 2001, Mister Gilder sold the apartment for around $15,000,000 to his downstairs neighbor, Bruce Wasserstein.

It's not clear if Mister Wasserstain planned to combine the two apartments–which one real estate broker claimed in some article we can no longer locate would be difficult because of the layout–but if he had done so he would have wound up with an almost unimaginable 20+ room 11,000 square foot beast with some of the best views of Central Park that money can buy.

Listing information, although slim on photos, shows the mansion-sized co-op crib includes 4 bedrooms, 5.5 renovated poopers, at least 3 fireplaces, a paneled formal dining room with three exposures, a living room with views over Central Park and as far north as the George Washington Bridge, a library and a "state of the art" kitchen with three huge windows and a separate dining area. The original 14 rooms have been winnowed down to 9 and the maintenance and common charges run, according to listing information, a stomach churning $14,777 per month.

The very quiet Harold and Judith Winters own the top floor unit at 927 Fifth Avenue. Iffin we're being honest, and we always are, Your Mama has no idea who these Winters people are or why they have the dough-re-mi to reside in the top floor of one of New York City's better and most costly cooperative apartment houses, but they do. It was outside Mister and Missus Winter's apartment, atop the arching pediment above the window and below the elegant and ornamental cornice, where the famous Pale Male and his ladee Lola made their original nest.

In addition to Mister Wasserstein's $26,000,000 apartment on the 11th floor, 927 Fifth Avenue's maisonette unit is also on the market with an asking price of $8,900,000. Currently configured as a doctor's office, the 4,000+ square foot ground floor space has been on and off the market since at least August of 2007 when it was listed at $12,950,000.

According to the Columbia University Archives, the maisonette was originally designed as a 10-room residence with a private entrance on East 74th Street. Formal living and dining rooms and a breakfast room spanned the width of the apartment a long corridor off the entrance hall lead back to two family bedrooms with Jack and Jill pooper and a master bedroom with private facilities. The kitchen, tucked into the dark belly of the building, was flanked by three cell-sized staff room that shared two small closets and one closet sized pooper.
Marketing materials for the maisonette include a potential floor plan (above) for the transformation of the the doctor's office's current warren of rooms into a luxurious 3 bedroom and 4.5 pooper residence with a grand 45-foot long living room, formal dining room with built-in bar, library, and a windowless kitchen with butler's pantry an adjacent staff suite comprised of 2 small bedrooms that share a single windowless pooper.

Like every other real estate gossip who cares about such trivial things, Your Mama waits on pins and needles to hear who buys the apartment and whether the Wasserstein estate will opt to sell the tenth floor spread as well.

photo (building exterior): Property Shark
floor plan (maisonette): Brown Harris Stevens

Listen candy corns, it's Halloween, we're hopped up on the candy and we just ain't got that much for you today, so this one is short and sweet. Boo!

1.
Iffin Your Mama is being truthful–and we always are–we'd snitch on ourselves that we can't name from memory one single film starring Val Kilmer. We can't, 'tis true. A quick consult with the Internet Movie Data Base and we realize we've never even heard of anything Mister Kilmer has done since 2004 when he made a guest appearance on Entourage. Okay, we've heard of Knight Rider but thought it was a tee-vee show from the early 1980s with that nails-on-the-chalkboard David Hasselhoff. Besides, he wasn't really even on Knight Rider he was the voice of the car, K.I.T.T. Ugh

That said, in 2010 and 2011 alone, Mister Kilmer's got 15 (or so) projects in the hopper, in post-production, or in the planning stages, which means the moon-faced thespian and former hottie has been pretty damn bizzy lately.

The man has also been bizzy trying to unload his 5,328+ acre ranch outside of Santa Fe in Rowe, NM. He first listed the stunningly beautiful property a long time ago for $33,000,000 but recently lowered the price by $10,000,000, a somewhat shocking and desperate seeming amount. But then again, maybe the property was stoopidly priced at thirty three million.

There are, according to listing information, 6 miles of Pecos River frontage, 10 natural springs, 50 miles of hiking and riding trails and an Santa Fe adobe style main mansion filled with a lot of Native American artifacts that sprawls across 11,573 square feet and includes 7 bedrooms, 9 full and 2 half poopers.

Although we're not sure–which means don't take this to the bank–we think Mister Kilmer bunks down in Malee-boo when he's on the west coast.

2.
Noted New York City gallerist Jeffrey Deitch opened the Lower Manhattan Deitch Projects in 1996 with a show by Vanessa Beecroft and over the years presented the work of a whole lotta art making young guns like Cecily Brown, Ryan McGinness and Inka Essenhigh.

In early 2010 it was announced that Mister Deitch was to take up the reins of the top spot at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. His appointment has been, to put it mildly, controversial. Some say Mister Deitch has blazed a new and exciting path through the contemporary art world scene and breathed new life into a near moribund institution in part by erasing the lines between art and celebrity. Others will hiss that they hear the death knell of art ringing loudly in their ears when his name is mentioned in connection to the museum.

Whatever the case, Mister Deitch needed a place to live in Los Angeles and landed at the far western edge of the star studded Los Feliz neighborhood, just a quick hop from downtown where MOCA is situated. Mister Deitch recently gave Nowness a personal video tour of his nearly unfurnished but art filled house that happens to be just a few doors down from Brad Pitt's ever-expanding compound. It also happens to be where Cary Grant lived with his on-again/off-again man-friend Randolph Scott,

Property records show the house measures a sizable 6,727 square feet with 5 bedrooms and 4 poopers. Records also show the property was last purchased in 2006 for $3,200,000, which indicates that Mister Deitch leases the property. Besides Brad Pitt, Mister Deitch's nearby neighbors include tee-vee producer Keith Addis, Kevin Spacey, choreographer Adam Shankman, Christina Ricci, Mandy Moore, and screenwriter Mitch Glazer and his wife actress Kelly Lynch who live in the speck-tacular John Lautner designed Harvey Aluminum House.

Mister Deitch's house is a bee-yoot and has a "party room" that he's commissioned artist Richard Woods to outfit his "party room" like a "super Tudor-pop" environment where already got Tim Noble and Sue Webster's glitzy Golden Showers piece hanging. We're all goose-pimpled in anticipation of our invitation to the house warming once that Richard Woods room gets installed.

3.
Producer Robert Evans is a living legend around Tinseltown and like all good Hollywood legends, Mister Evans owns a legendary Jon Woolf designed Hollywood Regency style house in Beverly Hills, CA called Woodland.

Seven times married Mister Evans–who produced motion picture history like Rosemary's Baby, The Godfather, Harold and Maude, and Chinatown–hosted and entertained everybody who was anybody in Hollywood, not to mention and a whole lot of nobodies who wanted to be somebody. Henry Kissinger played tennis at Woodlawn, Robert Shapiro celebrated his 50th birthday there and Mister Evans did the bownchickabowbowm with a near endless list of Tinseltown beauties.

The New York Times recently sent a photographer into Woodland to capture some of it's beauty and myth. It's old-school, for sure, but it's magnificent and like Mister Evans, one of the last of its kind. Enjoy. We did.