The Dakota is one of the city’s most prestigious buildings, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to massive price reductions. A four-bedroom, four-bathroom condo at the building located at 1 W. 72nd St. is in contract for $11.5 million — less than half its former $24 million asking price and $1 million less than its most recent $12.5 million asking price.
The buyer of the approximately 5,000-square-foot condo is Mark Fisch, managing partner at Continental Properties, a New Jersey-based real estate firm. The seller, businessman John Burris, first listed his apartment with Brown Harris Stevens for $24 million in June 2008 and then reduced the price three times before finding a buyer.
During the summer, actor Alec Baldwin looked at the residence, which formerly consisted of 14 rooms before being reconfigured into 10 big rooms. The 29-foot living room has floor-to-ceiling windows and original moldings in a building famed for its prewar details.
Fisch, an ex-commissioner of the New Jersey Council on Affordable Housing, is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If there isn’t enough room for his art collection in the Dakota apartment, maybe he’ll donate more to the Met. His last gift — with his wife, Rachel — was Ludovico Carracci’s “Madonna and Child with Saints.”
Un-Caged
Actor Nicolas Cage has bought a lot of wacky real estate over the years. But he has just unloaded what was arguably one of his most sensible properties. A deal to sell his Olympic Tower condo at 641 Fifth Ave. has just closed at $7.5 million. The three-bedroom, 3½-bath residence was listed at $9.75 million.
The home is the combination of two 48th-floor condos with a total 3,550 square feet of space designed by LM Pagano, who decorated boats for Cage and his pal Johnny Depp. The buyer is a New York-based limited liability company. Brown Harris Stevens broker declined to comment.
Cage is also trying to find buyers for a castle in Somerset, England; a 24,000-square-foot mansion on 26 acres bordering a bird sanctuary in Rhode Island; a Paradise Island mansion; and a private 40-acre island in the Bahamas.
Cage once said, “I find ways of spending money that mystifies everybody around me.”
Let’s hope, for his sake, that his selling spree continues.
Bling Crosby
There’s been some recent action at 76 Crosby St., the fancy SoHo condo building where Kelly Ripa has a duplex penthouse, where Harvey Weinstein used to house stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and where Nicole Kidman once hunkered down after her breakup with rocker Lenny Kravitz (of 30 Crosby penthouse fame).
We hear there was a bidding war for a 2,578-square-foot apartment with a $4.35 million listing price.
The two-bedroom, two-bathroom space with 13-foot-plus ceilings, a 15-foot-wide gas fireplace and a Waterworks bath with a deep soaking tub in the master bedroom suite is now in contract after about three months on the market.
The mystery buyer will have a very curious neighbor. After the deal closes, the new owner will share the second floor with Gawker Media boss Nick Denton.
Sotheby’s broker Keith Copley declined to comment.
Once run down, the super-luxe street now includes the hip new Crosby Street Hotel at 79 Crosby St.