Stephen Sondheim’s house: Yours for $7 million
NewsThe townhouse where Sondheim lived for almost all his creative life has been put on the market, two years after his death.
I remember the place well, having spent a couple of hours there in his company. In the bustle of midtown Manhattan, it was quiet as a tomb and chilled as a martini. Sondheim, seldom at ease in company, seemed to occupy a space almost as empty as the one in these pictures.
Once he warmed to you, though, he engaged in the most concentrated way.
Okay, an overpriced extravagant real-estate listing, but there are much more interesting things going on in the musical world currently, such as the lawsuit against Chamber Music America: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/DocumentList?docketId=KWgwSsqifMH8mt74uTH8Lw==&display=all&courtType=New%20York%20County%20Supreme%20Court
Overpriced? I’m surprised it’s not at least double the listing price—and that’s without taking into account its provenance. This is a small, exclusive enclave of Manhattan with a legendary communal garden, and houses there are rarely on the market, as ownership typically stays in the family.
What really surprises me is that the listing photos include so many obviously personal effects, rather than being “staged.”
What would not surprise me is if someone like Lin-Manuel Miranda were to buy the house to preserve it as a museum/research center.
It almost looks like the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Boston.
Wildly mixed and garnished with false historicism.
Note the complete, multi-volume “Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians” on the book shelves.
Nice. I could be happy living there.
Steve was an absolute musical genius whose ability to compose for an almost infinite variety of themes and story-lines in musical theatre has to be astonishingly unique in the business! Steve was never afraid to take mind-blowing creative risks, mostly monumentally successful, a few times not-so but still memorably unique. Too bad this house can’t be an interactive museum dedicated to this master of his craft!
Anyone know how wide that is?
I see a rope to lift the flower bucket off its ledge for watering or whatever but… since it doesn’t lead to directly above the ledge… how do you lower the bucket back onto the ledge?
For $7 million, I don’t want to be swinging a bucket on a rope, hoping to stick the landing just right.
A beautiful house, full of character, in the midst of Manhattan. A snip (relatively speaking!), especially if one hankers after something more than a ‘loft’ or similarly heartless concrete box.
He also lived in a beautiful colonial style house in rural, bucolic Roxbury, CT. located about 80 miles from Manhattan.
So Stephen Sondheim “warmed” to Norman Lebrecht. Lebrecht says it, so it must be true.
Jason Robert Brown’s famous early song “Stars and the Moon” includes the lyric “I’ll give you cars and a townhouse in Turtle Bay, and a fur and a diamond ring…”
It’s an homage to Sondheim, since this townhouse is, in fact, in Turtle Bay.