Out and About: Location explains huge price gap

(Photo by scholl10)

When I ambled into open houses just 16 blocks apart on Central Park West, the tired old saw about location struck me as graphically evident.

In a building in the low 70s, I visited four apartments, each of them with prices that I find hard to justify.  They then ranged in price between approximately $3.5 million and $10 million.

That same day, I went to an open house in a building in the low 90s, and I was blown away by

Out and About: You gotta love the neighborhood

In early May, Riverside Park is this side of paradise.

A while back, I quoted Paul Purcell, who is a founder of Charles Rutenberg Realty, as mentioning what he termed an old saw:

You’ve got to like your home, but you’ve got to love your neighborhood.

Smart and obvious, though not to me until then.

The concept came back to me last month when watching a friend of mine, Teri Karush Rogers of BrickUnderground.com, on WNBC-TV, where she was talking about mistakes that buyers make.  She confessed that she twice had made one such mistake, and you’ve guessed what it is: She loved two places to which she moved but hated the neighborhoods.

As for me, I’ve lived in seven different Manhattan neighborhoods.  In order, they have been Morningside Heights, Washington Heights (in a section that has taken on airs as “Hudson Heights”), close to the East Village (18th and First Avenue), central West Village, Gramercy/Flatiron and now the Upper West Side near the 96th Street express stop on Broadway.

I can’t say

Out and About: Three into one don’t go

Imagine a complete room, a bedroom, at the top of this image of an apartment that just refuses to end.

Even apartments that have resulted from the combination of two units can challenge architects.  When it comes to combining three units, you can’t count on a challenge that is, in most cases, insurmountable.

Such is the case of the co-op with the floor plan at the right.

At the top, the room that I had to cut off was a one-bedroom apartment.  The first fully illustrated space now designated as “den/4th bedroom” was its the living room, and the incomplete one above was the original bedroom.  Where you see the walk-in closet to the right of the current den was the kitchen.

Moving