Harper Lee had something rarer than a best-seller — a dirt-cheap apartment in New York City.
The reclusive author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” who died in her native Monroeville, Ala., Friday at age 89, had maintained an Upper East Side apartment and renewed the lease only a few months ago.
Lee signed on for two more years for her one-bedroom at 433 E. 82nd St., even though she hadn’t occupied it since suffering a stroke in 2007.
“She’s up to date on her rent,” said property manager Steven Austern, who lives in the building.
He said the rent was less than $1,000 a month.
With Lee living elsewhere, Austern had a legal right to terminate the lease — and collect a higher rent from a new tenant — but he said he couldn’t do that.
“She was a personal friend of mine,” he said.
Lee was also friendly with other tenants in the building.
“She was a very Southern and hospitable type of person,” one neighbor said.
Lee would finish the New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle by 9 a.m. every Sunday and leave it on a table in the building lobby.
“There was never an empty box,” the neighbor recalled.
She was a big Mets fan but couldn’t watch games on TV because she never had one, he said.
“Her radiator leaked earlier this year and made a hole in our ceiling. That’s how we found out she lived there,” said Caroline Holden, who lives in a basement apartment.
Holden went on to proudly report to friends that the Pulitzer-winning author ruined her ceiling.
The building’s super, Carlos Nieves, revealed that Lee made him promise not to tell any details of her life after she died.
Lee’s apartment, 1E, looks out over an overgrown courtyard.
She had moved to Manhattan in 1949 and worked as an airline reservation agent. She wrote in her spare time until two friends gave her enough money to devote herself full-time to her craft.
She maintained a cold-water flat on York Avenue and 82nd Street until the building was demolished in 1967. She then moved across 82nd to the current place.
Lee would split her time between Manhattan and Monroeville, where she died in her sleep Friday at an assisted-living facility.
She was a regular at Ottomanelli Bros. butcher shop on York Avenue, visiting twice a day, first at 7:30 a.m. for a cup of black coffee and a raisin scone, said co-owner Nicolas “Uncle Nic” Ottomanelli.
She would go back in the late afternoon for a chicken, a lamb chop “trimmed real neat” or the first cut of Delmonico steak.
Recalled Ottomanelli, “She used to come in and say, ‘Remember, my knives aren’t sharp, so the steak has to be tender!’ ”