Out and About: The allure of Hamilton Heights

View of a Hamilton Heights from top floor of a nicely renovated 4,400-sf townhouse that is offered for $2.695 million.

For buyers accustomed to neighborhoods farther south, Hamilton Heights may represent challenges with respect to convenience, amenities and street life.

Yet on a recent tour of an even dozen open houses, I was struck anew with how vibrant the area is and how great is the value of properties in contrast to more popular parts of Manhattan.

As the New York Times has noted, the massive Columbia University development now rising to the south suggests that Hamilton Heights is on the verge of a boomlet:

. . . Hamilton Heights, largely unknown to those who have never cracked the 100s on the No. 1 train, is preparing for an influx of teachers, students and support workers. It is also anticipating the higher real estate prices that usually come with proximity to an Ivy League institution.

The Heights

Out and About: There’s a patch of blue (& white)

When it comes to obstructed exposures, it takes all kinds.

There are those where all you can see out the windows is forbidding blank brick walls mere feet away, often in courtyards.

Other more distant exposures may tower so high that the only way to glimpse the sky is to stick your head out the window.

Others may consist of buildings some distance away, perhaps half a block, where it is impossible to see anything worth seeing — not a skyline, not a river, nothing of interest and nothing particularly offensive.

Then there are those exposures like the one in the photo that are partly blocked by buildings across the way, letting in a modicum of light but permitting nothing like a view.  What they offer is a patch of blue.

The apartment from which I took this photo is

Out and About: Rolling conversions never smooth

Lots of terrace, tiny kitchen in 829-sf West End Avenue condo.

The temptation always is great to get in, as it were, on the ground floor.

That possibility occurs when a building’s owner decides to convert from rentals to condos with only a fraction of the tenants gone.

To my mind, the situation creates the worst of several worlds — the continuing presence of resentful renters, infrastructure yet to be completely (sometimes even mostly) updated, endless buyer traffic and the mess and interference of contractors in the building for months and months as they work on one apartment after another.

It is not immaterial that buildings with majority sponsor ownership cannot qualify for mortgages backed by Fannie Mae.

In the mid 90s

Out and About: $25 million is a lot of money

Fully paneled dining room of mansion on Central Park West.

Only buyers can determine what a property is worth to them, so there’s no way for someone who isn’t a lender’s appraiser to decide with any level of certainty the value of the mansion on Central Park West.

Twenty-five feet wide in the mid 80s, the house retains many original details such as carved mahogany mantles, bay windows, coffered ceilings, paneled dining room, very high ceilings, impressively scaled main floor and stained glass windows evocative of Tiffany.  There are three exposures and four outdoor spaces.

Three of the five floors were renovated to various standards, including central air conditioning; the top two floors have been gutted, exposing pipes and opening up walls and ceilings.

Out and About: 2nd time is charm, 3rd better

View over Morningside Park toward Harlem

Listing  brokers like nothing more than being the second agent asked to sell a property.

When the first broker’s exclusive listing contract expires, that’s when the seller casts about for a fresh approach.

Sometimes the seller has legitimate concerns about the first broker — for example, unresponsiveness, poor marketing strategy, few open houses.

But the failure to unload the property often isn’t because of the broker:

Out and About: 2 decorating styles worlds apart

(Flickr photo by Hennie Schaper)

The difference décor can make in an apartment is not always as graphic as in two co-ops that I visited on West End Avenue in the high 80s.

Although the one-bedroom units are in the same line separated merely by a number of floors, they present themselves as whole worlds apart.

The one that happens to be on the higher floor gripped me with its appeal.  The one on the lower floor repelled me, yet it wanted virtually nothing.

Sleek, spare and also inviting, the higher apartment was not decorated exactly to my taste.  But

Out and About: You are where you eat

Perfect example of a poorly combined apartment.

“Dining room” surely is one of the most commonly abused labels in the world of real estate sales as the term relates to space in an apartment.

(Well, I have to admit that “walk-in closet” is one of several other strong contenders.  Sometimes, “bedroom” is as well.

“Dining room” sometimes refers to other spaces that are tucked into alcoves or other odd corners of a property.  Honest sellers and their brokers may refer to “dining area,” though I’d say the term is dishonestly used just because a small table can be jammed into foyer.

The floorplan above is for a combined apartment on West End Avenue in low 100s.  Although the co-op has been expensively gut renovated, it has been impossibly designed.

The combination just doesn’t work as currently configured.

The dining room doubles as a foyer, or, more accurately,

Out and About: Get me outta here!

Do you wanna dance? Without the furniture, there’s plenty of room: That’s a grand piano at the far left and kitchen island near right.

Loved the apartment, hated the clutter.

This condo on a lower floor of a boutique building that is a stone’s throw from Lincoln Center in the mid 60s has a great deal going for it (though not views).

Among the pluses of this 1,586-sf unit are 10-feet-high ceilings, oversize windows, an elevator that opens directly into the apartment, terrific open kitchen with Viking, Pogenpohl and granite, small laundry room, and two lush baths that feature Italian marble, and plenty of closet space.  The living/dining room stretches 28 feet to the kitchen area and is 15.5 feet wide.

But oh

Out and About: You can forget about the gym

On a clear day, you can. . . climb up forever.

Selling an apartment is hard enough these days.  Selling one in a building without elevators is a challenge that can be overwhelming.

The photo looking up from the bottom of the stairwell nicely illustrates the problem facing the broker (and, of course, the owner) of an apartment four full flights from the building’s vestibule, itself several steps up from the street in the low 100s between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.

The broker tried to put the best face on her challenge.

She really likes the fact that there’s a little landing

Out and About: Seller lives in Fantasyland.

Lincoln Center (Flickr photo by Stewart Morris)

He closed on the place only last May, when it was listed for $2.15 million.

There was a bidding war for the two-bedroom, two-terrace, two-bath penthouse in a Central Park block of the mid 60s, an area that is part of Lincoln Square.

Because of the so-called “war,” the current owner — who appears to be an advertising agency executive — paid $2.5 million for the co-op, which costs him $3,269 in maintenance a month.

But for undisclosed reasons relating to the seller’s inability to continue living in New York, according to the listing broker, the apartment went on the market again in early December with an asking price that boggles the mind.