Real Estate

Icing on the cake

She also has a planted roof deck (above).

She also has a planted roof deck (above).

’STOCK PHOTO: Sylvia and Ben Weinstock have lived in TriBeCa since 1982. (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)

A CUT ABOVE: Sylvia Weinstock’s gorgeous wedding cakes have attracted A-list customers from all around the world. (Michael Sofronski)

Serving platters Sylvia found on her travels worldwide. (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)

It was 1980 and cake queen Sylvia Weinstock found herself standing on a TriBeCa street, looking in dismay at the “building” her husband wanted to buy.

“You couldn’t even call it a building,” she recalls. “It was a burnt-out shell. We’d just left Long Island, where we’d sold a five-bedroom house with a gorgeous backyard and a family room for about the same amount of money the owners wanted for this. I said to my husband, ‘What, are you crazy? What are we buying?’ ”

But Ben Weinstock knew that he was buying their future. His plan was to reconstruct that shell into a building that would be the home of the newly launched Sylvia Weinstock Cakes and also serve as an apartment for the couple.

Money, though, was a problem. The owners wanted $175,000, and there would be major expenses reconstructing the building. Sylvia (who had been a kindergarten teacher) and Ben (an attorney) had to borrow in order to set things in motion.

“The neighborhood then was nothing,” Sylvia remembers. “As I look back now, we should have borrowed more money and bought some more buildings. But we didn’t know. We were just lucky to be able to get this one thing.”

The building was one of multiple burnt-out structures in the then gritty neighborhood, and the Weinstocks got to work. They hired an architect, but Ben, 82, notes, “Everything that was done in here has my fingerprints on it.”

Ben would come up with designs and have the architect help implement them. He designed and installed the lighting systems and the fixtures in the living room. He built floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall bookcases.

“We did a complete reconstruction,” Sylvia, 82, says of the two-year process. (They lived in a rental on East 62nd Street during this span.) “When we moved [into the TriBeCa building in 1982], we had four stories — two for the apartment and two for the business.”

Two years ago, Sylvia had a request: “For our 60th wedding anniversary, I told Ben I wanted a new master bedroom, bath and garden. So he designed them.” And added a fifth level to the building.

The couple now live in a two-level apartment that’s about 2,400 square feet, plus a 400-square-foot roof deck that’s accessed via floating glass stairs.

The two-bedroom living quarters are actually only four rooms, plus 2 1/2 bathrooms, above Sylvia’s cake business. There’s a 22-by-22-foot living/dining room (with a 12-foot ceiling), a compact kitchen, the master bedroom and another bedroom that’s used as a study. And Ben continues to maintain the home into his 80s.

“He’s a retired lawyer with handy hands,” Sylvia says. “He can always fix anything mechanical. He’s a plumber, an electrician; he’s what they call a prize.”

And, with all that talent, they didn’t need a decorator. They did it all themselves.

“Ben saw the dining table in the window [of a thrift shop], but it was too expensive,” Sylvia says. “He saw it again and again, and finally he said to them: ‘Do you want to keep this forever or work with me on the price?’ They wanted $3,000, but he said, ‘I’ll give you $700 cash right now.’ So he bought it.”

And then she made needlepoint seats for the chairs they paired with the table.

“Everything has some kind of personal meaning,” Sylvia says. “We have artwork from the people we love, we have a teapot that belonged to my mother [she keeps flowers in it], we have two chairs from Ben’s law office — they’re called Bank of England chairs — and we have a ficus tree that we got when we first moved in here, and it thrived.

“My sterling silver I bought 23 years ago in Australia [which they visited to see where Ben was stationed during World War II],” adds Sylvia, who has also traveled to multiple countries to deliver wedding cakes. “We didn’t have any money with us. They let me take $5,000 worth of silver — a set of antique flatware for 12 — and I told them I would send them a check. Can you believe anything as wonderful as that? I’ll never forget it.”

All of this came about, of course, with the help of what became a hugely successful business that they take their keyed elevator to each day.

“I was a teacher, but I was always a homemaker,” Sylvia says. “I liked setting a nice table, I liked to cook, I liked to bake. I made a cake for a friend, and she put it in a store window. Someone saw it and told her caterer about it. When the caterer saw it, he said he’d never seen anything like it. So he started ordering cakes. He ordered one, then two, and then more. Soon hotels were ordering my cakes. And we were off and running.”

That was in the early 1980s.

“There are 24 hours in a day — I worked 26. Seven days a week. Ben left law [to work on the cakes’ packaging], and the two of us were in the baking business. It helped me get through the chemo. I didn’t have time to be sick or tired,” says Sylvia, who discovered she had breast cancer at age 50 and is now fully recovered.

Sylvia became the go-to wedding cake source for everyone from Mariah Carey and Michael Douglas to Donald Trump and the Saudi royal family.

Sylvia, whose cakes can cost thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars, is about to open her first retail store in Japan and she has plans to expand into China and the Middle East. She also found the time to write two cookbooks: “Sweet Celebrations” and “Sensational Cakes.”

“I would like to license and brand our name,” says Sylvia, who’s been called the Leonardo da Vinci of cakes. “I would like this name and the quality of what we do to go to people who’d appreciate it.” (Though none of her three daughters is interested in carrying on the business, Sylvia has plans that include some employees.)

“I think working is a mixed bag,” she says. “There’s joy in it and sometimes it’s frustrating. What we do is highly detailed. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime item. I can’t say, ‘I’ll do it better tomorrow.’ It’s the moment that counts. It has to be perfect. So there’s a lot of pressure.”

To unwind from that pressure, at the end of the day Sylvia and Ben go up to the roof deck with some vodka. Sometimes they reminisce about how they met on a Fourth of July on Rockaway Beach 62 years ago.

With a wicked gleam in her eyes, Sylvia says: “We met on Independence Day, and that’s the day he lost his independence.”

It’s clearly a joke Ben has heard before, and he has a ready answer. “That,” he announces, “was the worst mistake I ever made.”

Then they both start laughing.

SYLVIA WEINSTOCK’S

FAVORITE THINGS

* Her commercial Garland stove with six burners, two ovens, a broiler andagrill

* Her espresso machine

* Serving platters she found on her travels worldwide

* The dining table

* The roof deck

* The new master bedroom and bathroom

* The collages of her grandchildren’s photos on her bedroom wall. “I see their photos every day,” she says. “If they were in albums, I’d never see them.”

* Artwork created by friends—including pieces from Judith Leiber (with one of her famous cats), a painting by abstract artist Gerson Leiber (Judith’s husband) and a sculpture by Ellen Brennan-Sorensen