Her nickname now is “The Queen of New York Real Estate,” but Barbara Corcoran was still on a pauper’s budget the day she saw the penthouse that would become her home.
It was 1992, and Ms. Corcoran, the founder of Corcoran Realty, was pinching pennies. To make ends meet, she had picked up a side hustle delivering letters for a messenger service. On one errand, she took an envelope to the top floor of a building at Fifth Avenue and 97th Street. Stepping off the elevator into the apartment, she glimpsed past a pair of French doors to see a lush terrace with sweeping views of Central Park.
“I thought, my god, I’ve never seen anything as beautiful in my life,” said Ms. Corcoran, 76.
In a story she’s now retold enough to make it real estate lore (including in The New York Times), Ms. Corcoran handed the envelope to the home’s owner and asked her to please call her should she ever put the home on the market.
More than 20 years later, her phone rang.
In 2015, Ms. Corcoran, a star investor on the reality TV show “Shark Tank” and now in a much more comfortable financial position, paid $10 million for the unit. It was a price she was happy to pay, she said in an interview, because of its two best features: its location and its views.
“Any house I ever bought, I bought the spot, not the space,” she said. “You can control the space, but you can’t control the spot.”
For the interiors, she had a new vision, and immediately set about gutting the unit down to its studs. Eighteen months and at least $2 million more later, Ms. Corcoran had flipped the upstairs and downstairs floor plans, turned a greenhouse into a breathtaking indoor/outdoor dining room and added a full chef’s kitchen adjacent to the terrace. Throughout the renovation, Ms. Corcoran and her daughter, Kate, who was 10 at the time, sometimes slept in sleeping bags on the terrace under the stars.
All that remains of the original duplex’s interiors is its curved staircase, which Ms. Corcoran said has become difficult for her husband, Bill Higgins, 80, a retired Navy captain, to climb.
“And I’m not running those stairs anymore, either,” she said.
Having come to terms with the fact that she and her husband would be more comfortable in a one-story home, Ms. Corcoran is bidding farewell to the dream spot.
It’s a sentimental goodbye. The penthouse has been the site of well-attended soirees under the twinkling lights of her rooftop solarium — pajama parties, October Day of the Dead themed fetes, and even a milestone birthday celebration where she planned a mock funeral for herself and sprung up out of a coffin.
Visitors to the 4,600-square-foot apartment step out of the elevator into a grand foyer. The unit has five bedrooms, five full baths and two half baths, plus a library with a wood-burning fireplace, a butler’s pantry, and that off-the-terrace kitchen, with a French basin sink, custom white cabinetry and an ILVE range.
“She’s a real estate genius and the way she has designed this home represents her genius,” said Scott Stewart, a broker with Corcoran who is co-listing Ms. Corcoran’s apartment with fellow Corcoran broker Carrie Chiang. “The apartment is laid out like a multilevel jewel box.”
The asking price is $12 million. Monthly maintenance is around $11,000.
Though Ms. Corcoran is moving on, she is staying in the neighborhood. It’s been a short search.
In December, Ms. Corcoran read in The New York Times that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s longtime pied-à-terre — just a few blocks away and with its own knock-the-wind-from-your-lungs views of the park — was for sale for $9.95 million. She liked the price and the location. And she really liked that the unit was only one floor. She put in an offer, but was outbid.
“It’s always about money, honey,” she told me.
In January, she received more bad news: Her treasured Pacific Palisades mobile home burned to the ground in January in the wildfires, a loss she described as gutting. But shortly after, Ms. Chiang, the Corcoran broker, called her with good news: She had found a new one-story Manhattan penthouse that she was sure Ms. Corcoran would love, one that would also allow her to stay in the neighborhood of Carnegie Hill. She made an offer on the spot, which was accepted.
As for the penthouse’s $12 million price tag, she knows that she is asking for less than she spent buying and renovating it. But she said she believes that the price is fair and buyers will bid up if the market bears it.
“I never thought I would ever leave,” Ms. Corcoran admitted. “It’s easy to spend money when you’re building a lifelong dream. For me, real estate is emotional.”
Debra Kamin reports on real estate, covering what it means to buy, sell and own a home in America today.
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