The longtime Upper West Side home of Peter Yarrow, who rose to fame as part of the popular folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, is being sold by his estate, nearly four months after his death from bladder cancer.
The asking price for the apartment, a loftlike duplex at 27 West 67th Street, known as an artists’ studio building, is $4.44 million, according to the listing broker, Michael Graves of Douglas Elliman Real Estate, who was also a personal friend. Monthly maintenance is $7,291.
Mr. Yarrow bought the unit, off Central Park West near Lincoln Center, in the early 1980s and raised his children, Christopher and Bethany, there. He held group rehearsals in the double-height great room and hosted fund-raising events and get-togethers there with musicians like Pete Seger, Harry Belafonte, and Neil Sedaka, along with politicians and activists.
“It was a hub of music and art and culture and activism,” said Bethany Yarrow, who runs two nonprofit environmental groups and is herself a folk singer. (Christopher Yarrow is a songwriter.) “There was an extraordinary wave of human beings passing through and singing all the songs of the great movements,” she said.
Noel Paul Stookey, part of the trio, fondly remembers his time there, too. “The size of the living room was comfortable for the three of us,” and their arranger and bass player during rehearsals, he said in an email, “and at the same time, large enough for the special events that Peter would host, drawing as many as 100 folks.”
Measuring around 2,500 square feet, the apartment sits on the ninth and 10th floors of the prewar building. There are three bedrooms and three full bathrooms, plus a home office/den that could be converted into another bedroom.
The unit also comes with storage space in the basement and a small “penthouse” office on the rooftop where Mr. Yarrow’s personal assistant had worked. (“It was once used as a sleeping room before the co-op changed the rules,” Mr. Graves said of its past iterations.)
The home’s main entrance is on the lower level. A foyer opens to the enormous great room with vaulted ceilings and a wood-burning fireplace with a carved stone mantel. An extra-large window provides an abundance of sunlight, along with panoramic cityscape views.
“You have a floor-through, so light floods in from the north and the south,” Mr. Graves said.
Off the great room, through folding French doors, is a spacious formal dining room, which Ms. Yarrow said her father had closed off and for awhile turned into a den with his favorite massage chair there.
Over the years, Mr. Yarrow made few other changes to the apartment. “My dad didn’t do much remodeling, it was more like he did a lot of restoration,” Ms. Yarrow said, noting that he had restored the window in the great room and other prewar details like the cast iron sinks, textured plaster walls and ceilings. “He loved the authenticity of that apartment,” she said.
Beyond the dining room is a windowed, eat-in kitchen with a barrel-vaulted brick ceiling and pantry. The kitchen is outfitted with wood cabinets, a butcher block center island and terra-cotta tile floors.
The lower level also contains a guest bedroom with plenty of closet space and a full bathroom.
Leading up to the second level, the staircase wall displays several photographs of Mr. Yarrow and his family. These include performances with Peter, Paul and Mary at Carnegie Hall and the trio’s participation in the March on Washington, the site of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
“These were his favorite moments in life,” Ms. Yarrow said.
Peter, Paul and Mary was one of the most popular folk acts of the 1960s, with a string of hit songs including “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which Mr. Yarrow co-wrote; and “Day is Done.” (The group started in 1961, during the Vietnam War, and disbanded in 1970; it reunited in 1978 and continued to perform until Mary Travers’s death in 2009.)
When the Yarrow children were growing up, they had a front-row seat to the private concerts held in the apartment. “The acoustics were extraordinary,” Ms. Yarrow, who splits her time between Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and West Fulton, N.Y., said of the great room. “It’s like when you’re in church — it echoes.”
On the second level are two more bedrooms and two bathrooms, which can also be reached via the building’s elevator. The primary suite, with glass panels that look down onto the great room, features an en suite bathroom and a home office/den.
Ms. Yarrow has fond memories of her childhood bedroom. “I would play Led Zeppelin very loud from my boom box,” she said.
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