From left: famed Holocaust scholar Robert Jay Lifton, a bedroom inside 300 Central Park West, 300 Central Park West’s exterior, the living room at 157 West 87th Street and the building’s exterior

A combination of two rarely available El Dorado apartments — one of them the former home of famed Holocaust scholar Robert Jay Lifton — has already generated a near-asking-price offer since hitting the market last week, brokers said. Cathy Taub, an executive vice president at Stribling & Associates, has listed Lifton’s old stomping grounds at 300 Central Park West for $7.2 million. The eight-room co-op, 7G, is now owned by one of the richest families in the country, the MacArthurs, according to broker sources. The unit can be sold individually, or for $13.4 million, combined with the adjacent apartment to create a 15-room spread. Also, a townhouse that hit the market today for $4.95 million comes with a waterfall. The four-story brownstone at 157 West 87th Street is listed with Vandenberg, the Townhouse Experts. Click here for more.

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HGTV’s new realty reality show, “Selling New York,” premiers tonight at 9 p.m., promising to showcase the “top of the real estate food chain.” The show follows Gumley Haft Kleier’s Michele Kleier and her broker daughters, Samantha Kleier Forbes and Sabrina Kleier Morgenstern, as well as Core’s Shaun Osher, among other brokers from each firm as they maneuver their way through some of the city’s most high-end real estate transactions. In honor of the debut, The Real Deal did some digging to find out which of the city’s prized properties are slated to be featured this season. Among them: a four-bedroom loft at the Chelsea Mercantile listed for $22.45 million, the 25 Murray Street loft for which former Giants star Michael Strahan is asking $1.85 million, a $17 million landmarked townhouse at 109 East 69th Street, and a 2,295-square-foot spread at highly-anticipated One Brooklyn Bridge Park (see slide show of many of the homes above). Click here for more information about the residences expected to appear in the upcoming season.
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From the December issue:
While Manhattan buildings have seen sale discounts as high as 70 percent in this recession, this is not the first time the city has seen bargain-basement prices for skyscrapers. Indeed, in the early 1990s, when New York was in the throes of another recession, a flurry of deals was brokered that in hindsight seem shrewdly forward-thinking. This month, The Real Deal took a walk down memory lane and looked at some of those real estate deals to see which buildings traded at significant markdowns and which investors made savvy bets.

From the May issue: The building that has bragging rights to the
most expensive closing in Upper Manhattan, with a penthouse apartment
that sold for $15 million, has dozens of other units sitting empty and
unsold. Marketing at 1200 Fifth Avenue, a conversion of an Emery Roth
building located between 101st and 102nd streets, first started in
mid-2006, when the Harlem real estate market was peaking. And while the
marketing campaign claims the building is in the “heart of the Upper
East Side,” some brokers say its lofty Upper East Side price tags minus
that actual location have hindered sales. Note: Correction appended
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