The lobby of the Jumeirah Essex House on Central Park South doesn’t offer a refuge from the hustle of nearby Seventh Avenue, but a continuation of it. The hotel now contains some high-end apartments, but it’s still a hotel, and the piped-in jazz burbles just above the clatter of bellmen pushing luggage and the sound of men in suits talking loudly on cellphones. Sit still for more than a few moments, and a waiter is likely to approach to ask if you’d like a drink, testing the fine line between luxury service and a hard sell.
Nancy Candib and Christopher Bland, with Brown Harris Stevens, tour a condo with a mirrored ceiling on Central Park South.
On the 40th floor of the same building, however, all was silence and celestial light Friday afternoon in one of the building’s four penthouse condos. Outside the windows, a thick layer of cloud floated about, as if it were an amenity designed to muffle wayward sounds. From the living room, Central Park, perfectly framed but miniaturized by the distance, had the look of a carefully groomed private yard.
A retired publisher, dressed in three contrasting shades of flannel (gray, dark gray and darker gray), was touring the home with a real estate broker, considering a move. He already had a sprawling apartment on the East Side with more square footage on the terrace than most people in Manhattan have for indoor space, but he was interested in room and maid service, luxuries his current building couldn’t offer.
Elsewhere in New York, certainly in places like southeast Queens and central Brooklyn, maybe even on those winding Central Park paths that looked like the tracks of a train set, people were probably asking themselves unanswerable questions that cloudy morning: How would they pay their mortgage when their adjustable interest rates ballooned? How far would the subprime market fiasco go, and would it take their jobs with it?
At the Essex House duplex for sale, the questions bandied about floated on a wholly separate plane, one held up by at least a decade of good investments in a roaring market. Could someone install an elevator in those hallway closets on the two floors? Might the building allow an atrium, if not a terrace, to be built just off the bedroom?
As was widely reported last week, there seems to be no crisis of confidence in the high-end housing market of New York. In the first three months of this year, average apartment prices in Manhattan rose by 33.5 percent to $1.7 million — and much of that increase was carried by the boom in sales of apartments at the high end. In the same period, the number of apartments that closed for more than $10 million, for example, rose by 318 percent, according to calculations based on public records and provided by Brown Harris Stevens, a luxury residential real estate firm.
Not that even those kinds of prices promise perfection. The front door of the Essex House duplex — 2,800 square feet going for close to $10 million — opened up on a stairway whose Champagne-colored carpet looked dingy. A telltale towel on a windowsill revealed a leak, and there was an excess of mirrors on part of the first-floor ceiling, with predictable results. Anyone in the market for a $10 million home would inevitably renovate anyway, but it was surprising — no, it was heartening — to see that even buyers with that kind of money have to endure a boring bit of patter from the broker about the repointing work being done to the exterior.
“Where are the sellers from?” asked the prospective buyer, looking skeptically at a tall, husklike sculpture in the bedroom. California, the broker told him. “That explains it,” he said.
The availability of new luxury housing like 15 Central Park West and the Plaza accounts for much of the high-end real estate boom — but how to explain that in those buildings, priced at $5,000 to $6,000 a square foot, bidding wars are still not uncommon, even as the economy wobbles, from many reports, on the edge of a precipice?
“Scarcity,” said Nancy Candib, the broker showing the duplex.
The subprime mortgage fiasco may be complicated, but the high-end real estate market is not: There are still more people who can afford to have it all than there are apartments that actually have it all — the views, the space, the prime location and the amenities.
This is what makes New York sometimes feel unlivable: the notion that you can be asked to spend close to $10 million on an apartment with a leaky window, or $6 million on one with low ceilings and no views, and still have to pay $275,000 for storage, as was the case with one apartment viewed last week on the Upper East Side. You could even walk out of 15 Central Park West, as the wife of an electronics magnate did last week, feeling disappointed in the cramped kitchen of an apartment going for $15 million.
But those absurdities are also part of New York’s shiny allure. This is a city so well populated by the super wealthy, even they are forced to compromise. New York promises the attainability, in all economies, of untold affluence; it’s everywhere, there for the making or taking. It advertises the possibility of wealth, as well as the consoling limitations of what it can buy, all in one real estate market.
The former publisher left the Essex House apartment expressing enthusiasm mostly for the possibility of that elevator. The lack of a terrace, not his stock portfolio, might be what held him back.
As for the wife of the electronics entrepreneur, she wasn’t in a hurry to decide.
“I think the prices are going to start coming down in a few months,” she said, explaining why she’d wait before making an offer. If the high-end market does soften, it probably won’t be because of the buyers’ financial anxiety.
“I think we’re heading for a period of really dark times,” she said.
From her point of view, the market could only get better.