The new penthouse owner arrived at the stately Galleria building in Manhattan practically unnoticed, as if standing on a dark stage just before the curtain is raised.
Word spread. “I think I heard it from my neighbor, who heard it from the concierge,” said Emma Ruth Yulo-Kitiyakara, 78, a former resident in the building.
It was true. David Copperfield was moving in. “He might magic you out of your apartment,” someone joked.
That was in 1997. Years later, the building’s residents would be well aware — painfully aware — of the world-famous magician’s sprawling, four-floor penthouse apartment. It seemed to transform before their eyes from a showpiece of great wealth to an embarrassing eyesore to a leaky health hazard.
And then, according to neighbors in the Galleria, Mr. Copperfield — for his next trick — disappeared.
A lawsuit filed earlier this month in New York accuses Mr. Copperfield of abandoning his penthouse apartment in a “trashed” state and allowing a valve to fail, flooding apartments and common areas below. And not for the first time.
New Yorkers have long lived alongside celebrities in the cramped city they all call home. Sometimes things go wrong. When your neighbor in TriBeCa routinely fails to keep the sidewalk clean in front of her home, racking up over 30 tickets from the city, it doesn’t really matter that she is Taylor Swift.
Sometimes the person complaining about a celebrity is also a celebrity. In 2007, an Upper West Side fireplace used by Billy Squier, a mainstay of 1980s Top 40 radio, was sending smoke into a neighbor’s apartment upstairs. That neighbor was Bono.
Mr. Copperfield’s relationship with New York City is long and colorful and, for now anyway, apparently on pause.
He lives in Las Vegas, where he appears 15 times a week in his show, “An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion.” His attorney in this matter, Matthew A. Cuomo, said the lawsuit’s assertions are exaggerated. “This is nothing but an insurance claim,” he said.
Mr. Copperfield grew up in New Jersey and has spoken of stealing into Manhattan as a boy to learn magic. After finding great success, he set his sights on the Galleria in the mid-1990s, and the tabloid gossip pages took notice.
“How did David Copperfield get the owners of the luxurious penthouse apartment at the Galleria to drop their price from $18 million to the paltry sum of $11 mil?” The Daily News asked in 1997. “Could be his best trick ever.” He ultimately paid $7.4 million, according to the new lawsuit.
The price cut, the column suggested, perhaps owed to the strange layout of the idiosyncratic apartment itself. The 16,000-square-foot, quadruplex penthouse was designed for Stewart R. Mott, the son of a General Motors executive, whose passions included philanthropy and gardens. The penthouse’s unusual glass walls would allow him to “greet the sun on rising from his bed in the East Solarium and to watch it sink from a desk that faces west, all amid 10,000 square feet reserved for planting,” The New York Times wrote in 1975.
But as building costs for his dream home continued to rise, including fortifying the building to accommodate the weight of the soil he wanted for planting, Mr. Mott’s enthusiasm for the place dwindled. He was also known to be an otherwise busy man (“When The Washington Post reported that he had slept with 40 women over an eight-month period,” The Times wrote, “he issued a correction, saying the number was actually 20.”) He never moved in.
The apartment’s earliest occupants did not remain for long, and then Mr. Copperfield arrived.
He was unquestionably a household name at that time. A popular string of prime-time 1980s television specials culminated in what is perhaps his best-known trick, making the Statue of Liberty vanish in front of live and television audiences, and then bringing her back.
But to his seen-it-all neighbors below, Mr. Copperfield was simply the guy with the penthouse. And an enigma.
“Never saw him, never met him,” said James Meyer, a former owner in the building. “I don’t know anybody who knew him in any sort of way.” He once got a look at the famous apartment — on TV, during a filmed interview with the magician.
Another former resident, Ellen Wiesenthal, said that not only had she never laid eyes on Mr. Copperfield, she doubted she would have known if she had. “I might not have even recognized him,” she said.
Ms. Yulo-Kitiyakara almost saw him, sort of, once, maybe. “I used to have a live-in maid,” she said. “The maid bumped into him in the elevator, or something.”
Ryan Drexler lived on the 48th floor for years and recalled seeing the magician in the elevator.
“No one speaks to him. He’s a very quiet guy,” Mr. Drexler said. “He’s not a chatty guy. He keeps to himself, and I respect that. Everyone’s got their way.”
Time in the Galleria is measured, for many, as before March 8, 2015, and after March 8, 2015, the date of the first major incident involving the penthouse.
Mr. Copperfield’s apartment began on the 54th floor of the Galleria. On his third floor — the building’s 56th floor — he had a private lap pool. A room containing the various pumps and machines required to operate the pool was directly below.
On that spring date in 2015, a valve in this pump room some 600 feet above the surface of the earth “failed,” in legal terms.
“Copperfield Flood No Illusion,” The New York Post reported. Water rushed through his apartment and seeped more than 30 stories below, soaking walls and knocking out an elevator, according to press accounts.
News coverage described a colorful collection of antique magic paraphernalia and arcade games in the penthouse.
“David was terrified, because he has these rare, vintage Coney Island machines, which are priceless,” said his attorney, Ted Blumberg, days later. “Irreplaceable antiques, including a fortune teller, strength testers, an electric shock machine and shooting galleries.”
But they were spared. “There’s a magic trick called the Bullet Catch, where the illusionist catches the bullet in his teeth,” Mr. Blumberg said after the flood. “And David thinks he really dodged a bullet here.”
There’s another magic trick, called Multiplying Sponge Balls, in which a person seemingly makes several objects appear out of nowhere. This happened in the months that followed at the Galleria, but with lawsuits.
Mr. Copperfield’s insurer sued the company that maintained the lap pool. So did at least two neighbors who lived below. The pool company in turn accused Mr. Copperfield, who was performing in Las Vegas at the time, of negligence — and at the same time blamed the manufacturer of the faulty valve.
The cases were bundled together into one and — poof — were abruptly closed in 2021 in the manner that typically follows confidential financial settlements.
The following year, Mr. Copperfield opened up his apartment to The Wall Street Journal for a tour. He went room by room, showing off “all this cool stuff to kind of give it a personality, a life,” he said. This included a “surprise chair” that dumped its occupant on the floor; stairs that became a slide; and water guns that shot backward into the user’s face, according to The Journal.
The pool was empty.
Another couple of years passed. Then, in around 2018, at a regular board meeting of the Galleria Condominium, a surprise guest appeared as if out of thin air.
“He just showed up,” said Sholeh Assadi, an owner in the building for 11 years. “He was friendly.”
He even offered the 20 or so people in attendance an impromptu tour of his home. Up they all went.
What they saw shocked his neighbors. “It was in disarray, very bad shape,” Ms. Assadi said. “We all saw. He didn’t care.” Room after room: “The bedrooms were upside down,” she said. And the bathrooms: “Mildew and mold everywhere.”
Marisa Lopez owned an apartment in the building for her mother, and believes that her mother attended the same meeting and later told her daughter about the tour of the famous magician’s apartment.
“He said, ‘Don’t you want a selfie with me?’” her mother told her. “He was very sweet.”
Shortly after that meeting, Mr. Copperfield disappeared, according to the new lawsuit against him. “Copperfield abandoned the unit in or about 2018,” it states, letting go of a housekeeper, a house manager and a handyman. The magician also owns an estate in Las Vegas and a resort spanning 11 islands in the Bahamas, and to those in the Galleria, who rarely if ever saw him anyway, it seemed as if he had simply forgotten about the penthouse.
“Rather than moving out in a safe and orderly fashion,” the lawsuit states, “Copperfield trashed the unit. Since then, Copperfield has allowed the unit to devolve into a state of utter disrepair.”
Finally, in December 2023, there was another flood — another bad valve, this time in a maintenance room that solely serviced the penthouse — that again caused damage to the apartments, elevators and common areas below, according to the lawsuit.
Other bad press for the magician followed this year. Newly released court documents in January showed that he had been a repeat guest at Jeffrey Epstein’s homes. And a story in The Guardian described accusations of sexual misconduct from several women. Mr. Copperfield denied the claims, and no charges have been brought.
The lawsuit included several photos of peeling paint, mold and mildew that made the rounds among former residents. “That guy’s got the original bathtub,” Ms. Lopez said with recognition.
Mr. Copperfield’s lawyer, Mr. Cuomo, said the photos “do not reflect the current state of the apartment.”
Perhaps they do not. If that’s the case, it would be just one more bit of sleight of hand — the latest trick at the top of the Galleria.
The post David Copperfield Vanished. The Problem of His Penthouse Remains. appeared first on New York Times.
