Celebrities are fun to watch, folly to follow

Can you see me now? (flickr photo by dunkr)

If celebrity endorsements didn’t matter, you wouldn’t see stars (many of them on the wane) shilling insurance, pills or perfume.

So it is hardly surprising that building developers like nothing more than to rub shoulders with notables of the silver and pixellated screens.  Real estate brokers are just the same.

It is, indeed, true that proximity to stars sells real estate, as the news media regularly remind us — for example, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times not so long ago.  But why?

Weekly Roundup: ‘Royalty,’ rates, prices, more

Luxury market in Brooklyn attains four-year high

When having your child sleep in a room, it really should have windows

Even homeowners facing foreclosure take to home repairs

For celebrity stalkers, there’s nothing like a cool map

New program aims to enable state courts to speed up foreclosures

Rents bordering Second Avenue subway drop but rise one avenue away

Mom, 92, battles son, 58, to get back into condo she owns

Slice of the Upper West Side overlooking Hudson River lacks name

Long Island City undergoes third wave of gentrification

Ambivalent about selling, a legendary interior designer lists his Manhattan pied-à-terre for $22.5 million. . . unfurnished

Some basketball player indulges

He agrees to an incredible shrinking price

Eddie Murphy's nice little place in New Jersey

Nearly five years after his seven-bedroom Englewood, N.J., mansion went on the market for $30 million, Eddie Murphy has cut the asking price by $15 million, reports the New York Daily News.

Celebrity comings and goings such as his are recorded in my free bi-weekly e-newsletter, which I write every two weeks.  The next issue is tomorrow around noon.

Known as Bubble Hill (with uncommon prescience), Murphy’s 25,000-sf dwelling, on a five-acre estate, comes complete with a bowling alley, theater and recording studio.  Among its 32 rooms are a full-size racquetball court, indoor pool, elevator and a carriage house with gym.  Annual taxes are $197,723.

When the property first hit the market in 2004, it became the most expensive single-family home in the Garden State.

And, oh, if you’d like to make an offer, do call me.  Morning, noon or the middle of the night.

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Malcolm Carter
Licensed Associate Real Estate Broker
Senior Vice President
Charles Rutenberg Realty
127 E. 56th Street
New York, NY 10022

M: 347-886-0248
F: 347-438-3201

Malcolm@ServiceYouCanTrust.com
http://www.ServiceYouCanTrust.com

Don’t wait for spring to clean out your closets

Sweet isn't she? The dog, not the bitch.

If you think your closets are overstuffed, if you’ve had to rent extra storage space, if you can’t find that chapeau that you well recall and if mushrooming clutter is your bane, you’ve got nothin’ on the folks listed by the New York Times in its blog recently.

I wrote about the list in my current e-newsletter, so you can skip this post if you saw it. But I’m adding some additional names below.

She may become one of the Supremes by fall, but Sonya Sotomayor doesn’t currently live like one

Judge Sotomayor resides. . . in a modest building that is ideally situated in terms of neighborhood amenities too numerous to list (though I confess to a preference for the homemade mozzarella at Joe’s Dairy a minute or two walk away).  But she’s practically on top of Sixth Avenue and it’s traffic, including emergency vehicles and buses.

Sotomayor lives in a two-bedroom, two-bath, 980-square foot apartment.  The condominium at

The wages of Wall Street’s ills are for sale

First came a report in the New York Post that James Nicholson’s oceanfront mansion, built in 1994, is now on the market.  Now, a former Wall Street chief executive is trying to unload his 6,200-square-foot Park Avenue apartment

For rent: The best-known gardens since Babylon

Welcome to a home with a history.  If it’s not haunted by ghosts, it is replete with memories, the spirits of the numerous cats that exhausted their nine lives there, a documentary film and a Tony-winning production on Broadway.

A source tells New York magazine that journalists Sally Quinn and her husband Ben Bradlee are renting out Grey Gardens, the storied six-bedroom East Hampton mansion, famously chronicled in a Maysles documentary.  From August 28 to Labor Day, the place can be yours for a mere 

The walls are alive with the sound of music

If walls could sing, I’d love to hear their music about the sprawling, eight-room apartment at the Osborne that went on the market a couple of weeks ago. The onetime home of cabaret singer Bobby Short and composer Leonard Bernstein has been listed for the first time in two decades, according to the Real Deal.

Apartment 4B is a four-bedroom, 3.5-bath co-op in the century-old Osborne at 205 West 57th St., designed with 11 stories on the front and 15 on the back. The asking price is $3.495 million for the apartment, which underwent 14 months of meticulous restoration before going on the market in late April. Diagonally, across from Carnegie Hall, the landmarked building has another celebrity apartment for sale as well. As noted in my newsletter, it belongs to