Look what they did to Isaac Stern’s apartment

Look what they did to Isaac Stern’s apartment

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norman lebrecht

July 01, 2019

They sold the Central Park condo last week for something in the region of $15 million.

After Isaac’s death in 2001, it went for $3.4m. The new owners bought the next-door apartment and knocked them together. Here’s what they got.

 

No trace left of music or friendship. The only thing that will make your eyes water is the price.

 

Comments

  • Doug says:

    “No trace of music or friendship.” In other words, exactly as it was when Stern was there.

  • Esther Cavett says:

    It was Jerry Seinfeld who did this !

    • Ivor Morgan says:

      ==It was Jerry Seinfeld who did this ! ++

      Thanks for that nugget, Esther.

      Blimey JS must be the luckiest comedian ever. Without Kramer, Elaine & George he was & is nothing. His London O2 performances a few years ago (ticket prices £100) were dire.
      Hard to know which was worse, Isaac past him prime scraping through the Beethoven cto, or Jerry doing his old ‘Hey, did you ever notice….?’ shtick

      • MacroV says:

        Seinfeld is brilliant, and if you like Kramer, George and Elaine, well…they were the creations of Seinfeld and Larry David. Maybe his comedy just doesn’t translate across the pond, that whole “two countries divided by a common language thing.”

  • Esther Cavett says:

    From a NYT interview:

    ‘I found out what he was earning,” Mr. Stern said of Mr. Seinfeld. ”I was sorry I sold it for that price.” Only after the sale did Mr. Stern turn on the sitcom that made Mr. Seinfeld rich enough to afford it.

  • Realtor says:

    It’s not a condo – it’s a co-op.

  • Ed says:

    Really cheap. No music in the neighborhood.

  • Nick2 says:

    Wasn’t this apartment transferred to Stern’s new young wife before his death, and this resulted in large part to his children ending up with almost nothing from his estate? The wife obviously did a lot better.

  • Dan P. says:

    It used to be you only had to be extraordinarily wealthy to live on Central Park West, South, or Fifth Avenue. Now you have to be obscenely rich to be able to afford even smallest broom closet in NYC unless you’re already situated there going back decades. And the Stern apartment is not unique.

    The apartments owned or rented by musicians all over Manhattan – and especially the Upper West Side – who lived well, but frugally, are now owned by (and only afforded by) hedge fund managers, doctors, lawyers, and the like. It not only affects the apartments themselves (like that belonging to the late Mr. Stern) but the neighborhoods as well. Bland, bland, bland. And instead of those of us on our way to the old New Yorker Theater to see the latest Bergman or Truffaut film, or to its adjacent book store, or even to the many coffee shops, you see nannies of color in white uniforms, pushing baby strollers in front of upscale chain stores where all the great but quirky shops used to be. The whole place has become very uninteresting, sad to say.

  • Harry Collier says:

    That is America. Guns, money, religion, and money.

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