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| Want to Live in NYC? It’ll Cost You | |||||||
| After a new report shows the average two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan now sells for more $1 million, our columnist takes a tour of some ‘average’ abodes and decides he’ll stay in the Brooklyn borough | |||||||
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| Oct. 20 — Lost among the stories about the baseball playoffs, the Pope’s 25th anniversary, the Chinese putting a man in orbit (yawn), the likely FDA approval of silicone breast implants (are these people nuts?!) and the latest Bush administration’s failures in Iraq, was one juicy piece of news last week: A new report revealed that the average two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan now sells for more than one million dollars. |
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NOW, AS SOMEONE who considers himself an ambassador from the strange and distant nation known as New York City, it falls upon me to explain what that means: It means that many Manhattan apartments—consisting of two small bedrooms, a small living room, a bathroom so small that the sink, shower stall and toilet are practically the same devices, and a kitchen barely big enough to allow you to prepare dinner to eat on a coffee table in that small living room—cost more than one million dollars. One million dollars for a living space that approximates the size of Verne “Mini-Me” Troyer’s trailer on the “Austin Powers” set? Clearly, it was time for another of my award-winning fact-finding tours, this time into the very heart of the heart of darkness: Gaphattan. I called a bunch of Manhattan real-estate brokers and was told, in short, if $1 million sounds like a lot of money, maybe you should just stay in Kansas where you belong, sweetie. “We deal with executive relocations a lot,” says Pam Liebman, chief executive officer for The Corcoran Group, the most exclusive of the Manhattan brokers. “These are wealthy people who come from big suburban houses. I show them million-dollar apartments in Manhattan and their first question is, ‘What do you mean I can’t get a five-bedroom house with a backyard?’ It’s like sticker shock. But you’re not just buying an apartment. You’re buying the city.” “I had one the other day,” adds Julia Cahill, one of Liebman’s top brokers. “He looked around the apartment and then said, ‘Where’s the dining room?’ Dining room?! I just said to him, ‘This is New York City. The entire city is your dining room.’” If this sounds strange to you, consider this: We New Yorkers don’t have pornography. We have the real estate section. Just like the desperate man who flips through a smutty magazine pondering, “What would it be like to be naked with that woman?” we New Yorkers cuddle every Sunday with the real estate pages, peering over the schematics and airbrushed photos of lush furniture and wondering, “What would it be like to walk around naked in that apartment?” And my fact-finding tour revealed this: It wouldn’t be that great. Cahill was nice enough to show me a small three-bedroom apartment on tony East 73rd Street with an asking price of $999,999. The building is on a fairly nondescript block—although Cahill quickly pointed out that the block was “designed by Bing & Bing” (which I guessed was either an architectural firm from the 1920s or a husband-and-wife team of acupuncturists). The building was immaculately maintained with seasonal flowers planted in the tree pits out front (they’re pumpkin-colored mums right now). Clearly, you get what you pay for (and what you pay is $2,200 a month in “maintenance”—enough, I’ll remind you, to send a kid to an Ivy League college for a year). The apartment itself was extremely nice if you like things cozy and don’t have too many worldly possessions. The master bedroom, for example, accommodates the king-sized bed and two knave-sized tables, but not much else. A married couple could have sex in this bedroom, but only if they don’t try anything particularly vigorous. A second bedroom is perfectly suitable for a child—that is, a Dickensian child who hasn’t filled his room with toys, books, dolls or all that pastel-colored junk that the grandparents are always buying. And when I entered the third bedroom, I felt so cramped that I asked (innocently, I assure you!), “Isn’t this what would’ve been called ‘the maid’s room?’” Cahill and Liebman jumped down my throat as if I’d just swallowed a gold ring: “It’s not a maid’s room!” they both screamed simultaneously. (OK, but it’s still so small that it can contain a couch, a desk and maybe a few random thoughts, but that’s about it.) As a New Yorker, I found myself actually thinking, “Hmm, this isn’t so bad for $999,999.” But, thankfully, the hallucinogens I’d devoured two hours earlier finally wore off. So I asked Cahill again how she could possibly explain to out-of-towners that a million dollars gets you a small three-bedroom pad. She responded unapologetically, like a Detroit auto executive justifying 10-mile-per-gallon SUVs. “New York is the mecca of the world,” she said, ignoring that the actual Mecca is in Saudi Arabia, where a three-bedroom goes for two sheep and a 14-year-old bride. “People pay to live here.” It’s true, New York is still a magnet that draws the hopeful, the dreamers and the high-powered into one black hole from which not even the greatest force in the galaxy—ambition—can escape. But I told Cahill that many of my successful friends are moving to nice suburbs like Montclair, New Jersey, where, according to Sunday’s New York Times real estate pages, $920,000 can buy an 11-room Colonial with cathedral ceilings, a master bedroom suite, a big backyard and still leave you with enough money to buy groceries every week for 25 years. |
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And forget Montclair. In Kansas City, Mo. , the same amount of money gets you a four-bedroom, four-and-a-half bathroom mansion with rooms so big you could invite Louis XIV over and not feel embarrassed, an in-ground pool and fully equipped pool house and extensive grounds. And closets?! These closets are so big that you shouldn’t invite over anyone from Manhattan because they’re liable to think these closets are two-bedroom apartments. Buy this estate and you’ll still have enough left over to fill the two-car garage with Saturns. And in Pittsburgh (often voted the nation’s “Most Livable City”), you can get a gorgeous five-bedroom, five-bath mansion, with a pool and have enough money left over for to buy a Starbucks Frappuccino every single workday for the next 100 years. Cahill was unimpressed. “Live there and you’ll spend half your life in your car. New York City gives you the world at your fingertips, 24 hours a day.” To demonstrate the wealth with which some people are willing to part in order to live in Manhattan, Liebman later took me to a one-bedroom, one-million-dollar apartment in a building on Park Avenue (location, location, location) owned and operated by Donald Trump (mendacion, mendacion, mendacion). As someone who always endeavors to explain New York City to my readers in the other 50 states, I realized that there is just no way to explain Donald Trump to anyone beyond a few millionaires on the Upper East Side or some drag queens in the East Village. When you walk into a Trump building, you are so fully ensconced in marble that you think you died and became Tutankhamen. The hallways are immaculate and reminiscent of the best five-star hotels. The wood floors are polished to a shine. And there are so many servants—concierges, doormen, doorwomen, people standing at large oak desks—in uniforms and epaulettes that you feel like you’re in the embassy of an impoverished, Third World country whose dictator has plundered the treasury to compensate for his limited manhood. But make no mistake: Trump buildings are the cream of the New York crop. They are monuments to the man himself. They are simultaneously the old money hag who knows the difference between Ionic and Doric columns as well as the starlet who strips at an after-hours club hoping a paparazzi photographer is there. Trumpian buildings revel in their old world grandeur while also wallowing in new world kitsch. Talk about a man with an edifice complex! But the Trump name adds value to an apartment, so that’s why it costs the same as buying a Thanksgiving dinner at the Bowery Mission for 719,000 people to get a one-bedroom unit (and leave you feeling like a eunuch). “We showed it to someone today and he started making a list of all the possessions—his couch, his dresser, etc.—that he’d have to get rid of,” said Laura Cordovano, the broker. “Well, what do you expect for $900,000, a dining room? I know it sounds sick to the rest of the world, but it’s actually a great deal.” “It” is a small apartment consisting of one average-sized bedroom, an average-sized living room, a small kitchen with appliances fit for a king, and a hotel-style bathroom replete with gold-colored faucets, white marble floors and a phone jack. “We do have a different set of values in New York City,” Liebman added (and she’s not talking about bizarre New York values like transgendered marital rights, the importance of pet psychologists or support for strong labor unions—she’s talking about people who simply must live in a pre-war building on Park Avenue). “This is what successful people want.” Until they realize they need room for a second chair. Gersh Kuntzman is also Brooklyn bureau chief for The New York Post. His website is at www.gersh.tv |
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|  © 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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