Yoko Ono, the Japanese artist, musician, author and wife of late Beatle John Lennon, has leased 10,000 square feet at 76 Wooster Street, the New York Observer reported, to exhibit Lennon’s artwork.
The exhibition will run for four days this weekend inside the four-story brick building between Spring and Broome streets, the Observer said, in honor of what would have been Lennon’s 71st birthday. [more]
In a rare move, the co-op board of the Upper West Side’s famed Dakota has fired back at a former president who alleged racial discrimination by releasing financial documents detailing the reasons behind why he was rejected from buying another apartment in the building. According to the New York Times, the board filed a 237-page response in State Supreme Court yesterday to a suit filed by former president and money manager Alphonse Fletcher earlier this month. Fletcher, who still owns three apartments in the building, including one that he bought for his mother in 2001, had claimed that the board barred him from buying a fourth, $5.7 million unit because of his race, citing previous instances of board prejudice he’d observed against actor Antonio Banderas and singer Roberta Flack. [more]
Yoko Ono and the Dakota
A Korean tourist waltzed into the usually tightly-secured Dakota through its service entrance last week to snap a few photos from the roof of John Lennon’s old haunt and was only caught after running into Yoko Ono herself while he rode the elevator down. According to the Post, Ono was merely startled by the incident, but residents are furious at the security breach. “They may fire the managing agent,” a source told the paper. (Douglas Elliman Property Management declined to comment). Another noted that Ono and Lennon, who was killed outside the building in 1980, are “the whole reason they have heightened security there, more than any other building.”
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New York City landlord Mark Arrow is suing Braswell Galleries — which recently auctioned off Beatle John Lennon’s famed white suit from the “Abbey Road” album cover for $46,000 — to satisfy a previous rent debt, the Associated Press reported. Braswell Galleries was told before the Jan. 1 sale that a court had determined that seller Biond Fury, a memorabilia collector, owed more than $21,000 in rent for his former Manhattan apartment owned by Arrow, according to Arrow’s lawsuit. Arrow’s lawyers say they told the Norwalk, Conn.-based gallery not to go through with the sale, and that the gallery should now have to pay up. Arrow had been unable to collect the rent debt from Fury, but became more hopeful after he heard of the auction sale, according to his lawyer, Adam Leitman Bailey. Comments
The unit to see the biggest price cut today is a one-bedroom,
three-bath co-op at the Dakota, at 1 West 72nd Street, according to
Streeteasy.com. The price of apartment 1011 was cut by $1.6 million,
and the home is now on the market for $5.9 million. The unit is listed
for 21 percent less than its asking price of $7.5 million when it first
went on the market in July 2008. Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Dolly
Lenz has the listing. According to Streeteasy.com, there are four
apartments for sale in the famed building — where Judy Garland, John
Lennon and Leonard Bernstein lived — and three of the homes have had
their prices slashed. TRD
