Blackstone bigwig closes on Getty unit for his private art collection

Tom Hill, the Blackstone Group billionaire, closed on a commercial condo at the Getty that will house his renowned art collection.

Hill paid $29 million for the unit spanning the third and fourth floors of 501 West 24th Street, property records filed with the city Wednesday show. The Getty is a 12-story luxury boutique condo developed by Victor Group and Michael Shvo and designed by Peter Marino.

Hill went into contract on the 6,500-square-foot unit in 2016, and the $29 million price means he paid just over $4,450 per square foot for it.

His extensive collection of contemporary and Renaissance art includes works by Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Cy Twombly. The 400-plus-piece collection is valued at over $800 million.

In April, the Lehmann Maupin gallery paid $27 million, or about $4,400 per foot, for their gallery space on the building’s first and second floors. That same month, another private equity billionaire, Robert F. Smith of Vista Equity Partners, paid $59 million for the building’s triplex penthouse, marking the priciest closed sale in Downtown to date.

The Victor Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hill ran Blackstone’s hedge fund business until last year. His involvement in the bidding war for RJR Nabisco in the 1980s earned him a mention in the seminal business book “Barbarians at the Gate,” in which he was described as an “an oiled-back Gordon Gekko haircut atop 5 feet, 10 inches of icy Protestant reserve.”