22 East 71st Street
Now the gallery is in federal bankruptcy court and all but gone, the victim of a tangle of lawsuits from angry collectors who said that the dealer behind the gallery, Lawrence B. Salander, had defrauded its customers. But the art world’s loss is a gain for the Manhattan real estate market.
Though the gallery had almost seven more years to go on its lease, it is giving up the property at the end of April. Two brokers at Sotheby’s International Realty — Serena Boardman and Meredyth Hull Smith — have just put it on the market and hope to get the highest price ever for a Manhattan mansion: $75 million, and it needs a bit of work.
The house, at 22 East 71st Street, is 45 feet wide — double the width of a typical town house — and five stories high, and has an English basement. It is topped by a green mansard roof and a series of balconies surrounded by stone balustrades. The building has about 22,000 square feet (with the right to build about 13,000 square feet more). The upper floors have been used for offices in recent years.
It was built in the early 1920s as a mansion for Julius Forstmann, a wool merchant from Germany who founded a worsted mill in Passaic, N.J. When he died, it was donated to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and used as a convent and center for the blind.
The house was owned for a time by the sports agency IMG, then was bought for $15.65 million in 2004 by Aby Rosen, a real estate developer, and his business partner Michael Fuchs. A few months later, they signed a lease with Mr. Salander’s gallery that was to run through 2015. The initial rent was $1.8 million per year.
From the beginning, the gallery had trouble paying that amount. When it filed for bankruptcy last fall, the owners moved to regain control of the property and collect back rent. In March, Mr. Salander agreed to move the gallery out by the end of April and allow the brokers to show it before then.
Since 2004, the value of Upper East Side trophy town houses has soared. The record price is now $53 million, paid in 2006 for the Harkness Mansion, at 4 East 75th Street, by J. Christopher Flower, who operates a private equity investment fund. According to city records, it is wider — 50 feet wide — and closer to Central Park than the Forstmann house.
The settlement agreement at the gallery has some unusual provisions that just might stoke the imagination of some buyers looking to display their art collections. Mr. Salander gave Mr. Rosen a painting, “La Femme aux Chiens” by Édouard Manet, in lieu of a security deposit. Under the agreement, the owners will return the painting so that it can be auctioned off, in part, to pay some of nearly $1 million in back rent.
|
|
|
