Board approved: Who lives at The Dakota?

The Dakota once towered over Central Park. Rising along dirt roads on an underdeveloped swath on Central Park’s west end, it’s distinctive Renaissance-style architecture and claims of unparalleled luxury, quickly made it one of the best known residential buildings in New York City.

The Dakota

“Probably not one stranger out of fifty who ride over the elevated rails on either side of the rivers does not ask the name of the stately building which stands west of Central Park, between Seventy-second and Seventy-third streets. If there is such a person the chances are that he is blind of nearsighted. The name of the building is the Dakota Apartment House, and it is the largest, most substantial, and most conveniently arranged apartment house of the sort in this country,” The New York Times wrote in 1884, the year the building was completed.

The Times called the Dakota, “One of the most perfect apartment houses in the world.” And even today, dwarfed by hundreds of skyscrapers, the building remains one of the city’s most recognizable structures.

Now the Dakota is the focus of the fifth installment of LLNYC’s Board Approved series, which looks at the residents of Manhattan’s most prestigious apartment buildings.

(See the rest of the series here: River House; 740 Park Avenue; 834 Fifth Avenue; and 960 Fifth Avenue)

The slightly ostentatious building, located at 1 West72nd Street along Central Park West, is today perhaps best known for being the home of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Its entrance way is where Lennon was assassinated in 1980.

But its start was anything but macabre. The building’s developer Edward Clark and architect Henry J. Hardenbergh pioneered a new style of vertical living, a residential rental for upper-middle-class New Yorkers. It combined hotel amenities with spacious, upscale living quarters for 19th-century lawyers, bankers, and merchants. The Dakota was cutting edge in other ways, too. It contained elevators, an in-house power plant and boilers that could keep every structure in a four-block radius warm using steam heat.

Unlike today, the upper floors contained staff quarters, while middle floors housed residents. On the ground floor there was a communal dining room.

From the year it opened until 1961 — when it was converted into co-ops — the Dakota was not profitable. Clark’s heirs allowed it to become a sort of refuge for the creative types of yesteryear, including Lauren Bacall, Boris Karloff, John Madden, Leonard Bernstein, Rudolph Nureyev, Judy Garland, Carly Simon and Carroll O’Connor. Since then, successive co-op boards have been as strict as the Clarks were lax, with the goal being to ensure residents can afford the maintenance payments that a 132-year-old landmark requires. Cher, Billy Joel, Madonna and Judd Apatow were all rejected.

Here’s a detailed look at the residents of The Dakota at 1 West 72nd Street:

(Source: public records and published news articles)

Yoko Ono

Price paid: Undisclosed

John Lennon and Yoko Ono (credit: Jack Mitchell via Wikipedia)

Yoko Ono is, of course, the famed performance artist, philanthropist, peace activist and singer-songwriter, who was married to John Lennon until he was shot outside The Dakota.

Retrospectives of her work have been held at the Japan Society in 2001 and the Museum of Modern Art in 2015. Ono’s previous marriages, to Anthony Cox, a film producer, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer, ended in divorce.

Ono has a daughter with Cox, Kyoko, and a son with Lennon, Sean, who is a musician in his own right. Ono studied at Gakushūin University in Japan and at Sarah Lawrence College. Causes to which Ono has donated include the Strawberry Fields memorial to Lennon in Central Park, tsunami disaster relief to Japan, and an anti-hydraulic fracking group.

Roberta Flack

Unit asking price: $7,500,000

Roberta Flack(Photo credit: Roland Godefroy via Wikipedia)

Roberta Flack is a singer-songwriter. Her 1973 cover of “Killing Me Softly with His Song” became a number-one hit. Flack won a Grammy for the song, as well as for her 1972 version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

Before her successful career as a musician, Flack taught junior-high school and gave private piano lessons out of her home. She attended Howard University in Washington, DC, on a full music scholarship on the strength of her skills as a classical pianist. She grew up in North Carolina and Virginia.

Her apartment, which is currently listed, is across the hall from Yoko Ono’s.

Maury Povich and Connie Chung
Price paid: Undisclosed

Maury Povich and Connie Chung

Maury is a talk show host. Since 1991, he has hosted his namesake talk show, which features a segment in which the paternity of children is revealed on air.

His wife Connie Chung is a television news anchor. She was the first woman to co-anchor CBS Evening News. She has worked at CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN.

Alphonse Fletcher Jr. and Ellen Pao

Unit asking price: $12 million

Alphonse Fletcher Jr., who goes by Buddy, is a hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and former head of The Dakota’s cooperative board, who has experienced a reversal of fortune.

He established and ran his own fund, Fletcher Asset Management from 1991 to 2012, when the struggling fund was forced into bankruptcy. His career has included stints working as a trader at two investment banks, Kidder, Peabody & Co., (now part of UBS) and Bear Stearns.

Fletcher has filed two racial discriminations lawsuits, against former employer Kidder Peabody in 1991 and against the cooperative board of The Dakota. In the former suit, Fletcher won $1.3 million, but an arbitration panel did not find the bank had discriminated against him. The latter suit was dismissed in 2015.

He has been the target two sexual harassment suits.

Ellen Pao (Photo credit: Christopher Michel via Wikipedia)

Fletcher received a master’s degree in environmental management from Yale University’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in 2004. He received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1987. He grew up in Waterford, Connecticut.

Fletcher’s brother Geoffrey, is a screenwriter who won an Academy Award for “Precious.”

He married Ellen Pao, a Silicon Valley executive, in 2007.

Pao is a venture capitalist and a lawyer. Her career includes a stint at Reddit, BEA Systems (now a subsidiary of Oracle), Microsoft, and law firm Cravath Swaine & Moore. In 2015, a jury ruled against Pao, who had filed a gender discrimination suit against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

She is a former Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, as is her husband. Pao received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1998, a JD from Harvard Law School in 1994, and an undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1991, where she majored in electrical engineering. Pao and Fletcher have a daughter, Matilda. Pao’s previous marriage, to Roger Kuo, ended in divorce. She grew up in suburban New Jersey and speaks Mandarin.

Fletcher and Pao recently listed unit 52, one of two units they own in the building, for $12 million.

Robert and Carolina Siegel

Price paid: $2,200,000

Robert Siegel (Flickr/Joey Lax-Salinas)

Robert Siegel is a real estate developer and broker. He serves as the CEO of Metropole Realty Advisors, which he founded in 1993. Siegel is also the co-founder and principal at Bomber Ski, a skiing equipment company he established in 2013.

Since 2005, he has served on the board of trustees of the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District.

His career also includes stints working for his mother, Joan Siegel, a real estate broker and for Donald Trump. He received a JD from Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1988 and was co-founder and editor of the New York Real Estate Law Journal. He received a BS, with a concentration in economics and finance, from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983. At Bentley, he was a captain of the lacrosse team.

He is an alumnus of Green Mountain Valley School in Waitsfield, Vermont, class of 1979. The boarding school is known for its skiing program.

In 2015, he sued the Dakota’s co-op board for preventing him from moving into a unit at the building, which the board has been using as storage. He acquired the unit, a former ballroom, in 1999.

His wife, Carolina Siegel, is a homemaker. The Siegels have four children.

Gerald Luss

Unit price: Undisclosed

Works by Gerald Luss

Gerald Luss is an architect, sculptor. and furniture designer. Very little information exists online about the artist.

Sean Goodrich and Leslie Ann Finerman

Price paid: $11,500,000

Sean Goodrich and Leslie Ann Finerman (via NYSD)

Sean Goodrich is an investment fund manager. He is the co-founder of Aether Investment Partners, based in Denver, Colorado. His career includes stints at Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Jeffrey Slocum & Associates, First Union Securities (now Wachovia), Trigon Engineering Consultants, and Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm.

Goodrich received an MBA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BS from St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, where he majored in business and minored in Russian. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

Leslie Ann Finerman is a homemaker and former financial analyst. Her career includes a stint as an analyst at a credit hedge fund and at Morgan Stanley. She attended The University of California, Berkeley, and grew up in Beverly Hills. Finerman and Goodrich have donated money to the Central Park Conservancy.

Their nine-room, four-bedroom apartment is was on the market for $14.9 million. It left the market in December 2016.

Robert and Steffi Berne

Price paid: Undisclosed

Robert Berne

Robert Berne is a real estate industry executive and principal at Berne Realty. His career includes time investing with the Milstein family, and working for various New York City housing agencies and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He sits on the board of the Settlement Housing Fund and the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a think tank.

Berne served as chairman of the Columbia College fund from 1998 to 2000, is a former president of the university’s alumni association, and endowed a professorship at the school. In 2006, Berne received the Alexander Hamilton Award from Columbia University. Berne received an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1962 and a BA from Columbia College in 1960. He is married to Steffi Mokotoff, with whom he has two adult children.

Steffi Berne, née Mokotoff, is homemaker and philanthropist. A research scholarship at New York University (NYU) has been endowed in her name.

Claudia Aronow

Price paid: $5,300,000

Via NYSD

Claudia Aronow is a visual artist. She is the ex-wife of Martin Kimmel, a developer of shopping centers and the co-founder of Kimco Realty Corporation. Her two other marriages also ended in divorce.

Steven and Lori Sater

Price Paid: Undisclosed

Steven Sater is a playwright, lyricist and screenwriter. He received a graduate degree from Princeton University and an undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis.

Lori Sater is a ceramicist and jewelry designer.

Craig Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal

Unit asking price: $39 million

Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal at a Vanity Fair party (Photo credit: David Shankbone via Wikipedia)

Craig Hatkoff is a real estate financier turned philanthropist, children’s book author, video game producer, amateur guitar player, and patron to the film industry.

He co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 with his ex-wife Jane Rosenthal and actor Robert De Niro. Hatkoff serves on the boards of two New York Stock Exchange-listed companies, Taubman Centers and SL Green, and on the boards of various charities, including Dr. Richard Leakey’s Wildlife Direct, New York University Child Study Center, and The Borough of Manhattan Community College Foundation.

From 2002 to 2006, he served as a trustee of the New York City School Construction Authority. He left the real estate industry in 2000 to focus on writing, book publishing, and video game production, via the company Turtle Pond Publications.

Hatkoff received an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1978 and a BA from Colgate University in upstate New York in 1976.

Jane Rosenthal is a movie producer, a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, and a co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival. She has produced over 20 movies with her long-time collaborator and film festival co-founder Robert De Niro.

Her credits as a producer include “The Good Shepherd” (2006), “Stage Beauty” (2004), “About a Boy” (2002), “Meet the Parents” (2000), “Analyze This” (1999), “Wag the Dog” (1997), and “A Bronx Tale” (1993). Her career also includes nine years at CBS producing TV movies.

Rosenthal attended New York University’s (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts in 1978, after transferring from an experimental program at Brown University, which she had begun attending while still in high school. Her hobbies include collecting Victorian napkin rings and antique globes.

More than a year after announcing their divorce, their apartment hit the market asking $39 million.

Gregor and Cecilia Freund

Price paid: $3,900,000

Gregor Freund is an inventor, engineer, serial entrepreneur, and holder of 15 patents. He is the chief executive of San Francisco-based Versal Group, a provider of software for teachers.

He co-founded Versal with Carlos Cuadra. Freund established Versal in 2012. From 1997 to 2004, he ran Zone Labs, an anti-virus software maker. Check Point Software, a Nasdaq-listed IT security firm, acquired Zone Labs in 2004 for $205 million. Freund served as chief technology officer at Check Point from 2004 to 2005.

In 1994, he co-founded Starfish Software with Philippe Kahn. The company, which provided software enabling cell phones to synchronize with the personal computers of their users, was acquired by Motorola for $325 million in 1998.

Freund and his wife Cecelia have a son, Andreas, and a daughter, Tatiana. Cecilia Freund is a homemaker.

Their apartment was once owned by legendary NFL coach John Madden.

Robert Silich

Price paid: $1,150,000

Robert Silich is a plastic surgeon, writer, and lecturer. He invented a less invasive way to conduct facelifts.

He works out of an office on East 83rd Street and at Weill Cornell Medical College, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Lenox Hill Hospital, and the Manhattan Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital. Silich received his MD from Georgetown University’s School of Medicine in 1993 and a BA from the university in 1989.

Charles and Amy Spielman

Price paid: $5,650,000

Chuck and Amy Spielman, Marc Chase

Charles Spielman, who goes by Chuck, is a retired real estate investor, US Army veteran, and collector of classic cars and watches.

His career included a stint working for Helmsley-Spear, managing The Lincoln Building at 60 East 42nd Street. The office building has since been renamed One Grand Central Place.

Spielman married into the business. His wife’s grandfather was Maurice Spear, whose eponymous firm was one half of Helmsley-Spear. He and his wife established a San Diego-based showroom, sales room, museum, and restoration business, Only Yesterday Classic Autos and Hall of Heroes, which exhibits their collection of cars and military memorabilia.

He serves on the board of the Air and Space Museum in San Diego.

Amy Spielman is a real estate investor and philanthropist. She serves on the board of La Jolla Playhouse in La Jolla, California, as a trustee of North Shore University Hospital and of Temple Beth-El in Great Neck, a village on Long Island. She and her husband divide their time between Manhattan, Great Neck and San Diego. They have two adult children, Eric and Laura.

Harlan Coben and Anne Armstrong-Coben

Price paid: $2,400,000

Anne Armstrong-Coben and Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben is an author of mysteries and thrillers. His latest novel is “Fool Me Once.” His 2001 novel “Tell No One” was turned into a French-language movie.

He majored in political science and played basketball for the school. He grew up in New Jersey and is an alumnus of Livingston High School.

Anne Armstrong-Coben is a pediatrician. She is an assistant dean at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and a medical director at Children’s Aid and Family Services in Paramus, New Jersey. The latter organization works with children in foster care.

She received an MD from Columbia and a BA from Amherst College in Massachusetts. The Cobens, who married in 1988, have four children, Benjamin, Charlotte, Will, and Eve.

Bettina Caiola

Price paid:  $4,600,000

Bettina Caiola is the widow of Benny Caiola, a real estate tycoon and collector of classic Ferraris and Lamborghinis who died in 2010. She had four children with her late husband, Benny Caiola III, Luigi Caiola, Alfred Caiola, and Rose Caiola.

The family controls B & L Management, a landlord and property management firm with a portfolio of buildings throughout Manhattan. The Caiola collection of Ferraris was thought to be one of the largest in the world. Some of the cars in the collection, each worth over $1 million, were auctioned off in 2011.

Philip and Cheryl Milstein

Price paid: $20,500,000

No information is available.

Judy Hart Angelo

Price paid: $3,,250,00

Judy Hart Angelo is a singer, songwriter, the widow of financier John M. Angelo, who co-founded Angelo, Gordon & Co.

She co-wrote “Where Everybody Knows Your Name”, the opening theme song to television show “Cheers”, which ran from 1982 to 1993, as well as themes to other 1980s sitcoms. Gary Portnoy was her creative collaborator.

Anthony Paduano and Ruth Porat

Price paid: Undisclosed

Anthony Paduano is a lawyer and a founding partner of law firm Paduano & Weintraub.

From 1984 to 1985, he clerked for Chief United States District Judge for the District of New Jersey, Clarkson S. Fisher. He received a JD from Rutgers University School of Law in 1984 and was an editor of the school’s Law Review. He received a MSc from London School of Economics in 1981, a BA from Georgetown University in 1979, and grew up in Neptune, New Jersey, where his father was the chief of police. He married Ruth Porat in 1983.

Ruth Porat is a Wall Street executive turned Silicon Valley finance chief, a philanthropist, and fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.

She is the chief financial officer of Alphabet Inc. and Google Inc., Mountain View, California. She joined Google in 2015.

Mark and Gwendolyn Myers

Price paid: 6,766,000

No information available on the couple. They purchased the late actor Carroll O’Conner’s home.

Sydney  Weinberg

Price paid: $5,400,000

Sydney Weinberg is an heiress. Weinberg attended Scripps in Claremont, California and is an alumna of Rye Country Day, a prep school in Westchester.

Her grandfather, Sidney J. Weinberg, rose from working as a janitor’s assistant at Goldman Sachs to head the investment bank, a position he then held from 1930s to his death in 1969. Her mother was a Houghton, member of an old New England family whose patriarch founded Corning Glass.

Weinberg married Stanley F. Buchthal, a film executive in 1989. The marriage ended in divorced.

Jonathan Marc Sherman and Alexandra Shiva

Price paid: Undisclosed

Jonathan Marc Sherman and Alexandra E. Shiva

Alexandra Shiva is a film producer, director, heiress to an old Hollywood family fortune, and the founder of Manhattan-based documentary production studio Gidalya Pictures.

Her portfolio includes documentary films “Bombay Eunuch” and “How to Dance in Ohio”. She is the daughter of Gil Shiva and Susan Stein. They inherited their apartment from Gil.

Shiva’s maternal grandfather, Jules Stein, was the founder of a Hollywood production company and talent agency, MCA, whose clients included Bette Davis, Frank Sinatra, Greta Garbo, and Ingrid Bergman. She serves as a trustee of The Public Theater in New York.

Since 2003, she has been married to Jonathan Marc Sherman.

Jonathan Marc Sherman is a playwright and actor. He received a BA from Bennington College and grew up in New Jersey.

John Rydzewski

Price paid: Undisclosed

John Rydzewski is a financier and a member of finance committee of The Dakota.

He is the executive chairman and co-founder of Enumeral. He serves on the board of directors of Fidelis Care New York, a health insurer.

Rydzewski received an MBA and a BS from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Ronald Beck and Cynthia Lewis Beck

Price paid: $21,000,000

Ron Beck, Cynthia Beck, Darren Walker, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Striker, and Slobodan Randjelovic

Ronald Beck, who goes by Ron, is a retired hedge fund executive. He and his wife bought their Dakota apartment form the estate of Lauren Bacall.

From 2000 to until his retirement in 2015, Beck worked at Oaktree Capital Management. As of 2016, he served as an advisory partner at the firm.

From 1996 to 2000, he co-founded and ran private equity firm Seneca Capital Partners.

He received a JD from Stanford University Law School, an MBA from the university’s business school, and a BA from Stanford University undergraduate program, with a concentration in economics.

The Becks also own a home in Water Mill.

Jay and Mary Cirillo Goldberg

Price paid: Undisclosed

Jay Goldberg is an entrepreneur, software developer and philanthropist. He worked at IBM in the 1960s.

He is the general partner of Hudson Ventures, a venture capital fund he established in 1996. He serves on the board of trustees of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Cirillo is Goldberg’s second wife and they have been married since the late 1990s.

Mary Cirillo Goldberg is a financial services industry executive. She serves as the independent director on the boards of ACE and Thomson Reuters. Her career also includes a three-year stint as a managing director at Bankers Trust (now Deutsche Bank) and a 20 years at Citigroup.

David and Gail Bell

Price paid: Undisclosed

Ashley Bell, Chao Liao, Gail Bell, Andrew Bell and David Bell at the Inside the 2013 New York Theatre Workshop Gala!

David Bell is the chairman emeritus of Interpublic Group, one of the world’s largest marketing communications and services companies.

He has also served at the CEO of True North and Bozell Worldwide. He graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.

He also  serves on the board of directors of Primedia Inc., Warnaco Inc., DHB Industries Inc., the Partnership for New York, the National Forest Foundation.

Gail is an actress and director who has worked on “Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Off-Broadway, 1971), “The End of All Things Natural” (Off-Broadway, 1969), “The David Show” (Off-Broadway, 1968), and
“Who’s Who, Baby?” (Off-Broadway, 1968).

Ilon Specht

Unit asking price: $19, 500,000

Ilon Specht

Ilon Specht is the advertising executive who wrote L’Oréal’s “Because you’re worth it” campaign. She owns a four-bedroom co-op in the Dakota, which she has been trying to sell for over a decade.

She first put her4,500-square-foot  unit on the market on Halloween 2006 with a $19.5 million price tag, It still hasn’t sold.

Howard M. Greils

Unit price: $5,450,000

Howard Greils is a Los Angeles-based psychiatrist. He received an MD from Cornell University Weill Medical College in 1973.

He purchased the unit that sparked a discrimination lawsuit between the co-op board and Buddy Fletcher.

Benjamin Doller

Unit price: $4,000,000

Benjamin Doller is an auctioneer. He serves as vice chairman at Sotheby’s, in charge of the Americas. His areas of expertise include 19th century European paintings, Impressionist art, and modern art. Doller, who been with the auction house since 1979, serves as a senior auctioneer. He also serves on the board of the United States Tennis Association Foundation, of which fellow Dakota resident Mary Carillo is a past president.

Joseph Gerstner and Judith Smith

Price paid: $4,675,000

Joseph Gerstner is an attorney. Since 1981, he has worked at television network CBS, most recently as vice president in charge of labor relations. He received a JD from New York University (NYU) Law School and a BA from Boston College.

No information on Judith Smith was available.

Ydessa Hendeles

Unit price: $27.500,000

Ydessa Hendeles, and the artwork “From her wooden sleep…,” (Photo credit: Robert Keziere)

Ydessa Hendeles is a Canadian art collector, gallerist, philanthropist, and an heiress to a Toronto-based real estate fortune assembled by her father.

From 1988 to 2012, she ran the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, a contemporary art museum, as director and curator. Her other ventures include The Ydessa Gallery in Toronto, which operated from 1980 to 1988.

Jay and Diane Goldsmith

Unit price: Undisclosed

Jay Goldsmith is an investor in the debt of distressed companies and on the finance committee of The Dakota’s cooperative board. Goldsmith is the co-founder, with Harry Freund, of Balfour Investors, a merchant bank. Before establishing Balfour in 1975, Goldsmith worked as a securities analyst at E.F. Hutton and H. Hentz & Co., two investment banks that were swallowed up by rivals in the ensuing years. Goldsmith received a BA from State University of New York, where he majored in Medieval History.

Diane Goldsmith is a philanthropist. She co-manages the Goldsmith Family Charitable Foundation. The foundations other directors are David Goldsmith and Lisa Seidman.

They own two units in the building.

Arthur Chu and Jariya Wanapun

Price paid: $10,550,000

Arthur Chu is a physicist-turned-quant. He works as a partner at New York-based hedge fund Qvt Financial.

Chu has a master’s in physics and received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1994.

While at Harvard, Chu was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to study in England. He is an alumnus of Albuquerque Academy, a private prep school in New Mexico, class of 1990. He and his wife Jariya Wanapun have donated $175,000, covering full tuition to 10 scholarship students, to the academy.

Wanapun is active in supporting a variety of educational and community initiatives, including through their family foundation. She earned degrees in social studies from Harvard University and in interior design from FIT.

She previously worked in interior design and publishing, and is co-chair of community service at The Spence School.

Dian Woodner

Price paid: $5,575,000

Odilon Redon’s Ophelia

Dian Woodner is the daughter of real estate tycoon and art collector Ian Woodner, who died in 1990. She manages the family’s art foundation and its donations to museums, including 100 pieces by Odilon Redon to the Museum of Modern Art.

Ping Jiang and Yi-Bing Guam

Price paid: $16,500,000

Ping Jiang

Ping Jiang is a hedge fund manager. He established his own fund, Ping Capital Management, in 2008, and serves as chief investment officer.

His career included a stint as a portfolio manager at SAC Capital, the Connecticut-based hedge fund that shuttered in 2013 after its founder was implicated in an insider trading scandal. In 2007, a former SAC subordinate of Jiang’s filed an embarrassing sexual harassment complaint against his boss. Though the case was dropped, its details were unsealed in 2010. Jiang received a PhD in chemistry from Princeton University.

Yi-Bing Guam is the wife of Ping Jiang. The couple operate the Yibing and Ping Jiang Foundation.

David Folkerts-Landau and Maie Folkerts

David Folkerts-Landau and Maie Folkerts

Price paid:  11,593,238

David Folkerts-Landau is a German economist, bank executive, and patron of the arts.

He serves the chief economist at Deutsche Bank. He joined the investment bank in 1997.

His career has also worked at the International Monetary Fund and taught at University of Chicago Business School.

Together, the couple sponsor an art award called the Imke Folkerts Prize.

Garry Parton and Paul Epstein

Price paid: Undisclosed

Garry Parton has been a member of the Dakota’s cooperative board since 2013.

He is a vice president at Artsmart, an arts-focused consultancy. From 1996 to 2002, he worked as an equity analyst at Gruntal & Co., a boutique investment bank and brokerage.

He received a BS in chemical engineering from University of California, Berkeley in 1986.

Paul Epstein is a lawyer. He works as a senior vice president at the Leonard Bernstein Office. In 1969, he established Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, an organization he still runs.

He received masters in Near Easter Studies from Harvard University in 1965, a JD from Harvard Law School in 1964, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1961.

Alexander Weil

Alexander Weil

Price paid: Undisclosed

Alexander Weil is a producer of films, music videos, and commercials. He is the co-founder and chief executive of a New York-based animation and special effects studio, Charlex. Weil established the studio in 1979 with Charlie Levi. The 1988 movie Tapeheads, starring John Cusack and Tim Robbins is based on Weil and Levi.

He likely inherited his apartment from hi father Walter.

Jacqueline Shereen Bikoff

The Estate of Jacqueline Shereen Bikoff

Price paid: $13,000,000

The late Jacqueline Bikoff (1960-2015), who also used the name Jackie Berk, was the ex-wife of Gregory Berk, a doctor and cancer specialist.

Bikoff and Berk’s marriage lasted from 1986 until the early 2000s. He made headlines in New York a few years later for not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in back child support after the couple divorced.

Peter Sternberg

Peter Sternberg

Price Paid: Undisclosed

Peter Sternberg is a corporate lawyer. His practice focuses on cross-border M&A and trade relations. He is a partner at law firm Venable LLP. He received a JD from New York University Law School in 1985 and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982.

Rex Reed

Price paid: Undisclosed

Rex Reed

Rex Reed is a film critic. He has been writing movie reviews for the
New York Observer since the late 1980s.

Earlier in his career, Reed contributed to Vogue, GQ, The New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post. He has written eight books, including his 1968 collection of celebrity profiles, “Do You Sleep in the Nude?” Tom Wolfe included Reed’s profile of Ava Gardner in “The New Journalism,” an anthology of then-cutting edge non-fiction writing. Reed also acts on occasion.

He had a cameo appearance on the cartoon series “The Critic” and appeared on game shows and talk shows in the 1970s. Reed received a degree in journalism from Louisiana State University in 1960. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas.

Gerald DesRoches

Price paid: Undisclosed 

Gerald DesRoches, who goes by Jerry, is accountant.

Since 2002, he has worked at Andersen Tax (formerly WTAS) and now serves as managing
partner of the firm’s New York metro practice. The firm provides tax and financial consulting services and was established by former Arthur Anderson executives after the Enron scandal.

He serves the board of directors of the University of Connecticut Foundation. In 2012, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the university’s School of Business. He received a BS in accounting from the school in 1982.

Monisha Agrawal

Price Paid: Undisclosed

Monisha Agrawal Brimfield is a marketing executive. She is a director of consumer marketing at Condé Nast.

She received an MBA from Columbia University’s Business School in 2007 and a BA from Williams College in 1999. She majored in economics.

Joseph and Sharon Krashes

Price paid: 5,015,000

No information is available regarding Joseph.

Sharon Gail Jacobs Krashes is a pediatrician. Her career has included a stint at Mount Sinai Beth Israel and she attended Université Libre de Bruxelles Faculty of Medicine.

Miyoko Davey

Unit price: Undisclosed

Miyoko Davey is an art collector, philanthropist, and a champion of forgotten Japanese-born portrait painter Kyohei Inukai (1886-1954). Her husband, John Davey, died in 2012.

Ivan Berkowitz 

Price paid: Undisclosed

Ivan Berkowitz is a financier and lawyer. He serves as chairman of Great Court Capital, a merchant bank he co-founded. Berkowitz received a PhD in international law from Cambridge University, an MBA from City University of New York’s Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, and a BA from Brooklyn College, where he majored in economics.

Matthew Mallow

Price Paid: Undisclosed

Matthew Mallow is a corporate lawyer, fundraiser for Barack Obama, and a member of finance committee of The Dakota.

He serves as senior managing director and chief legal officer of BlackRock, an asset management firm. He received a BA from Brown University in 1964.