The Upper East Side mansion that once housed pornography baron Bob Guccione Sr. hits the market this month, and brokers are hoping to shed its notorious legacy as they seek a record sales price for Manhattan.
The 26-room, six-story mansion owned by Penthouse magazine’s founder and publisher since the 1970s was lost to creditors three years ago, though the reportedly reclusive mogul moved out only this January. He added features to the home, including marble statues of Roman emperors Nero and Vespasian surrounding the indoor swimming pool, as well as props from his X-rated movie “Caligula.” More refined additions include a marble staircase leading up to the home’s ballroom.
The Corcoran Group brokers selling the limestone mansion, located at 14-16 East 67th Street, said they advised the current owner, Laurus Fund, a private equity investment partnership, to go above and beyond the role of a typical seller in preparing the property for viewings and in getting rid of unwanted energy.
“We are doing a whole lot of things that haven’t been done before,” said Corcoran Group broker Leighton Candler, who is listing the property with her colleague Lisa Simonsen.
The brokers also had to face the decision of whether to bury or openly acknowledge the history of the home in their marketing (see sidebar below), and appear to have opted for openness. “He’s not in our marketing at all,” Candler said. “Though everyone does identify that Guccione lived here.”
While some may argue about its effectiveness, the brokers hired feng shui specialists to invoke the ancient Chinese practice to purify the former “pleasure palace,” which they said was left in poor condition.
They also advised Laurus to provide an engineer’s report, which is typically handled by the buyer, and to make all the necessary repairs before showing it to potential buyers. To infuse new life into the home, the property is going to host several nonprofit benefits, including one scheduled for June for the Metropolitan Opera. That should fulfill another feng shui recommendation — to have beautiful voices sing in the house, Simonsen said.
Candler and Simonsen also enlisted help from agents at Knight Frank, the London real estate firm, to secure prospective buyers because they think wealthy Europeans might buy it and “not your average New Yorker looking to move up from the classic six,” Candler said.
There will be a sealed bidding process for the Beaux Arts mansion — one of the largest private residences in Manhattan — with offers expected to start at $45 million, the brokers said. They said it should be sold by the end of June.
“You couldn’t build another house like it with double the money,” said Candler. “They come up only once every 50 years, and then that’s it.”
If it sells for what the brokers hope to get, it would break the Manhattan record for a single-family residence, which is currently $45 million for a condominium at 15 Central Park West. That sale took place at the end of last year, but hasn’t yet closed. It would also break the current record for a townhouse sale — the $40 million buy of the Duke Semans mansion by Russian oil magnate Tamir Sapir.
Sapir’s purchase as well as another top townhouse sale of last year — the $31.25 million purchase of 2 East 63rd Street by Russian business magnate Len Blavatnik — indicates the deep pool of Russian buyers out there. Knight Frank is considered to be an expert in the kind of Russian billionaires who have fueled mammoth price increases at the highest end of the London market. While the Corcoran brokers told The Real Deal there is no asking price for the property, they told the foreign press that the Guccione mansion is selling at an over-the-top $99,999,999 — an effort perhaps to snag an overpaying Russian.
“It was a case of throwing in all zeros or all nines,” Candler told the Independent of London. Of the Russians, she added: “Their buying power is astounding. Americans are finding it difficult to match the ruble.”
The 48-foot-wide mansion, formerly two separate residences — Nos. 14 and 16 — were built in 1879 and 1905, respectively. In 1920, Jeremiah Milbank, a banker and philanthropist, combined them to create a 20,000-square-foot house. Some of its remarkable features include the indoor swimming pool and ballroom, gymnasium, terraced gardens, Georgian library, glass-enclosed sitting room, and a master suite with more than 4,500 square feet of space.
Guccione purchased the six-story mansion in 1975, a decade after he launched Penthouse in Britain. At the height of his wealth in the 1980s — when the walls of his mansion were hung with works by Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Chagall, Degas, Modigliani, and Picasso — Fortune estimated his worth at $200 million.
By the late 1990s, as the Internet eroded the traditional pornography magazine business, Guccione opted to show hardcore, sexually explicit content in Penthouse, a mistake which eventually forced the parent company, General Media, to declare bankruptcy in 2003. That same year, Guccione, now 75, lost his legendary New York mansion for defaulting on real estate loans. However, he was allowed to remain there for another two years during which he lived as a recluse. Immediately after he moved out on Jan. 31, 2006 — reportedly heading to Florida trying to relaunch his former science publication Omni Viewings — the restoration process on the house began.
When a luxury address lives in infamy
Brokers differ on how to market New York properties with sordid pasts
Selling a property with a tainted history poses the question of whether to downplay its notoriety or play off it. Some of New York’s great real estate transactions get notoriety not for the sale, but for the crimes that occurred within. In a market where there are very few secrets at the top end, some think an accepting, but not exploitative, approach makes the best of a bad situation.
“There is no way that with a house that is stigmatized that you can hide it,” said Richard Steinberg, senior managing director of Warburg Realty Partnership. Last month, Steinberg sold the Upper East Side townhouse that once belonged to Irene Silverman, a New York socialite who disappeared from her home in July 1998. Her body was never found, but in May 2000, a Manhattan jury convicted Sante Kimes and her son Kenneth, Silverman’s former tenants, of murdering her as part of a scheme to steal the six-story residence.
When the house first became available after Silverman died, it languished on the market and eventually sold for half its original asking price to David Marvisi, a Manhattan nightclub owner. In 2004, Marvisi sold it to Steinberg’s client, a group of investors led by the Dominion Group, who gutted and converted the building into two triplexes.
“We went to all the publications and told them what we were doing, and they were all too happy to write about it,” Steinberg said. “The key is to use the publicity you have because you can’t hide it to make a negative image into a positive.” The units had signed contracts the first week they came on the market, he said.
When the Upper West Side apartment once owned by New York real estate heir and former murder suspect Robert Durst lingered on the market for over a year, Rhea Stein, who handled the listing with fellow Corcoran broker Barbara Sagan, said she didn’t blame its dark past. Durst’s 29-year-old wife, Katherine, vanished from the penthouse at 37 Riverside Drive in February 1982 and has never been found. Durst came under renewed suspicion in his wife’s disappearance in 2000, which resulted in his hiding out in rundown quarters across the country while dressed as a woman. In 2001, he was arrested for allegedly killing his neighbor in Galveston, Texas, but later acquitted.
A year after Katherine disappeared, Rabbi Joel Goor bought the place and decided to sell it in 2004. Rather than the specter of mayhem, the reason the property didn’t sell was more conventional — overpricing.
“If someone was killed there, it would be a different thing,” Stein said. “It was a non-issue because for a long time it was overpriced so people didn’t take it seriously.” The asking price for the penthouse was eventually reduced from $3.57 million to $2.95 million. Stein said it sold just below the asking price and closed last summer.