$100 Million For An Apartment & It’s Not Even Pretty

New York is buzzing about the fact that an anonymous mogul has set a new record for the most expensive condo sold in Manhattan by spending a hair over $100 million on a massive, glassy duplex in the new One57 building.

The mystery buyer was shielded by an LLC. The sale was announced in May 2012, but closed on Dec. 23, 2014, according to city records. The gargantuan price tag is the biggest for a Manhattan condo ever, surpassing the $88 million purchase of Sanford Weill’s 15 Central Park West penthouse in 2012 by fertilizer tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev’s daughter, Ekaterina Rybolovleva. …

The unit in Extell Development’s famous tower is a 10,923-square-foot penthouse on the 89th and 90th floors. Though it breaks the previous price record, it comes out to closer to $9,000 per square foot than the $13,000 per square foot that Rybolovlev paid for the apartment at 15 Central Park West.

One-hundred-million = a lot of zeros. Who has that kind of money to throw around? Foreign oligarchs, mainly, though also some domestic hedge funders. Lookin’ at you, Will Ackman!

What will said oligarchs and financiers get for their zeros? Space. Some amenities. Lots of windows. A view. The knowledge that they are blocking out the sun, much like Mr. Burns once did in Springfield, before he came to a bad end.

The two-story duplex encompasses 10,923 square feet, which is about 3.8 times larger than the average size of a new home in the United States — not terribly much larger, in relation to the cost.

… these aren’t just apartment buildings: They’re more like single-family mansions stacked on top of each other, creating a relatively low number of new units that just happen to be add up to one gigantic building. Most of these apartments will probably sit empty for most of the year, meaning their owners won’t need to pay a huge chunk of the taxes that the rest of the city pays. Oh, and they’ll be creating permanent shadows along the south end of Central Park, too.

To continue in this vein, here’s a Buzzfeed list of “six castles that cost less than an apartment in NYC.”

I’m as much of a committed New Yorker as anyone. Yesterday, while I was waiting for a subway train, a rat ran over my feet! But if offered the choice between a chateau and a townhouse, I might have to take the chateau.

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