In Deed! Photog Timothy White Shuttered at Glass Farmhouse; 43 Years on West 69th Street
By Matt Chaban October 9, 2010 12:52 am
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— Smile! That’s what Michael Gruenglas must be doing. The Skadden partner just picked up a sun-soaked 3,375-square-foot penthouse at 448 West 37th Street, the Glass Farmhouse, as the 13-story converted school is known. Almost the entire unit is skylights and terraces (a 3,000-footer), and it sold for $4 million. The seller, celebrity photographer Timothy White, certainly isn’t smiling about that.
According to a lengthy post over at The Real Estalker, Mr. White bought the unit for $4.495 million in February (the Real Estate Desk could find no sign of this in the property records). It can’t be all bad, though, given that Mr. White has been in the building a whopping 26 years, progressively trading up properties. The reason for the quick turnaround on the penthouse, which boasts two beds, two baths and two fireplaces (!!), was not immediately clear, nor was it clear whether Mr. White remained in the building.
— Would they dedicate a plaque on the corner lampost to The DH Corporation? The Real Estate Desk thinks not.
Something also tells the Desk that the secretive buyers of 39th West 69th Street lack the warmth and caring of Arlene Kahn, who was honored with just such a bronze memorial, as a blog post at the Times recounts. “We participated in everything: caroling, tree planting, Halloween. Our house was the Haunted House,” Ronald Kahn told the Gray Lady. A real estate attorney, he now lives in Sparta, N.Y. — though the deed lists an address in Lafeyette, N.J.
The family bought the five-unit, barrel-bellied limestone townhouse in 1977 for an undisclosed amount, according to city records. The sale price was $6 million, down from $7.25 million in May and an original ask of $7.9 million in July of 2008. That’s quite the price cut for “the best house on one of the best blocks in the city,” as Strubling’s Linda Melnick, Tim Desmond and Bahar Tavakolian put it in their listing. And yet given the Kahn’s 40-plus years on the block, the Real Estate Desk thinks Mr. Kahn probably still made out pretty well.
