Michael Gross - House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the Worlds Most Powerful Address

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Text designed by Paul Dippolito

Jacket design by Zoe Norvell

Jacket photograph by Peter Aaron / Otto

Author photograph by Christophe Von Hohenberg

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013017367

ISBN 978-1-4516-6619-9

ISBN 978-1-4516-6621-2 (ebook)

To Ophelia

Architecture keeps no secrets. It is the great communicator. It tells us everything we need to know, and more, about those who conceive and build the structures that define our cities and our time. We sense instantly whether their vision was mean or grand: whether they felt responsible only to themselves and the bottom line or to a larger idea of society and the world.

ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE, THE CLASH OF SYMBOLS (1997)

Our hopes, like towering falcons, aim

At objects in an airy height;

The little pleasure of the game

Is from afar to view the flight .

MATTHEW PRIOR, TO THE HONORABLE CHARLES MONTAGUE

Complete bullshit ! barks Carl Icahn.

The fourth-richest resident of New York City, Icahn, seventy-seven, is typically described as a corporate raider by detractors, an activist investor by admirers. All acknowledge that he strikes fear in the hearts of his prey. And he was cursing a blue streak at me.

Hed started almost as soon as I began telling him a story Id just heard about an attempt hed made, in fall 2005, to buy a new Manhattan apartment. And not just any apartment. It was one of a bakers dozen of penthouses atop Fifteen Central Park West, a two-tower luxury condominium then under construction at the southwest corner of Central Park. Or rather, two of its penthouses, which Icahn, who already owned one about ten blocks away, hoped to combine into something Brobdingnagian, the kind of home only a man like him might be able to afford, and more important, to fill, not just with possessions but with personality, a presence as awesome as the buildings location.

But Id also heard that this lion of finance had tried to haggle with 15CPWs developers, demanding a price cut, which certainly seemed in character for someone whod picked fights with Phillips Petroleum, USX, Texaco, TWA, and Time Warner. But that had turned out to be a tactical error, because the developers, Arthur William Zeckendorf and William Lie Zeckendorf, the third generation of a New York real estate dynasty, werent inclined to bargain.

Instead, the Zeckendorfs sold the double penthouse to the bidder behind door number two, Daniel Loeb, an equally prominent and pugnacious hedge-fund runner, another activist investor cut from the same cloth as King Carl. Only Loeb was a quarter century younger and willing to pay the full asking price. Which caused Icahn, on learning that hed been outbid, to launch an epically profane tirade at Will Zeckendorf.

Fuck this, fuck that. He said fuck five or six times in thirty seconds, then slammed the phone down, says Will. Dan was in there early. He was a fabulous buyer.

They didnt really know Loeb when hed called them up just as theyd begun selling apartments at 15CPW. Icahn had gotten to them first, introduced by one of the Zeckendorf brothers two partners, an Israeli-born billionaire named Eyal Ofer, who had invested with Icahn. Earlier that year, Ofer had pointed to 15CPW out the window of Icahns office at Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue and said, Look at that. His new building, rising above the tree line on the opposite side of the expanse of Central Park, was an impressive sight.

It was also an impressive site: Fifteen Central Park West occupies the first full-block lot on the periphery of the park to be developed in decadesand likely the last for years. Its position is equivalent to oceanfront property in California, an Eiffel Tower view in Paris. Besides its immediate proximity to that 843-acre masterpiece of urban landscape design, 15CPW is also walking distance from Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the citys best stores and restaurants.

Not long after Ofer pointed the building out to him, Icahn was invited to a small cocktail party in a temporary sales office near the 15CPW construction site, where the Zeckendorfs themselves showed him and his wife, Gail, a model of the Robert A. M. Sterndesigned, limestone-clad building and floor plans of some of those penthouses. One had already been reserved for Ofer, another for Will Zeckendorf. But the rest were still available, and Icahn focused on the buildings thirty-ninth floor, with two apartments that, so early in construction, could easily be combined into the largest in the building, with 10,643 square feet of interior space, two terraces of 677 square feet, fourteen-foot ceilings, eight bedrooms, ten bathrooms, and 360-degree views of Manhattan and beyond. And it would cost a mere $45 million (plus $28,607.34 in monthly charges).

We saw it, we liked it, I told them I was interested, Icahn says. I wasnt that excited by it. I dont invest in apartments. But Gail Icahn liked it, and Gail wanted to move; a new building was planned right next to their current one, a few blocks to the southeast, and it was going to block the sunset from their fifty-second-floor terrace.