A Luxury Tower on the Upper East Side, a 2br in the Village, a Studio in Greenwich Village

by Brendan O’Connor

Welcome to Surreal Estate, a new column in which we will explore listings from the tumultuous New York City real estate market.

Two Sutton Place North
$3,020–9,760/month
0–3 Bed

On the Upper East Side, two black glass towers pierce the sky above York Avenue immediately north of the Queensboro Bridge. The first was built twelve years ago; the second came to market in October — apartments, starting at $3,020/month, are currently being leased. “There’s nothing really like it on the Upper East Side. It’s so sleek, and modern,” Patricia Coleman-Palacios, a leasing manager with the Solow Management Corporation, said. “We get so many international people, and they all want new construction. Which is great for us!”

Walking through the nine-hundred-and-twenty-square-foot, five-thousand-dollar-a-month, one-bedroom apartment, Coleman-Palacios remarked, “It’s like old school New York.” The windows face north, east, and south. (They call that “triple-exposure.”) The Roosevelt Island Tramway zipped along the southern wall and windows; a woman waved at us. “They can’t really see in,” Coleman-Palacios said.

Despite the fact that the walls are as much glass as they are concrete, and that there is a major bridge less than a block away from the building, the apartments are neither cold nor loud. This speaks to the quality of the construction, Craig DeCecchis, a project director at CitiHabitats, said. “You don’t see this in the rental market,” he told me. When you open the closet doors, the lights inside turn on automatically. “We can’t even get developers in condos to do that,” DeCecchis said. “It’s a proper apartment.”

The building has a gym — private to residents, who must still pay an annual fee — as well as a pool. “It’s convenient,” Patricia said. “You have everything here. You don’t have to go outside!” If you do want to go outside — and, I mean, why would you, it’s so cold — the building offers shuttles to the nearest subway station, at Lexington Avenue.

Studios at Two Sutton Place North start at $3,020/month; one bedrooms (all with one-and-a-half bathrooms!) at $3,910/month; two bedrooms at $7,250/month; and three bedrooms at $9,760/month. “There are families, young professionals, students that go to FIT,” Patricia said, speaking of the renters who have signed leases already. “We have something for everybody.”

Matt Berdoff, an analyst at CAVU Capital Advisors, just spent the past two weeks pretending to be a real estate agent. “In New York, you’re always looking for a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or an apartment,” he said. “There’s always gonna be a bid.”

304 West 14th street, 1C
$3,395/month
• 2BR/1BA

His roommate of three years just got a job in Boston after promising his girlfriend that he’d move there. The pair broke their lease — resulting in a penalty of two months’ rent if someone doesn’t sign a new, year-long lease by the time they move out this coming weekend. Berdoff, who is moving to NoLiTa from their apartment on West 14th Street, just a few steps from the 8th Avenue L station, took this development in stride. “I got a cleaning lady in here, took some pictures, put them up on Craigslist, StreatEasy, Padmapper,” Berdoff told me. “My buddy even posted the listing on the bulletin board at Goldman.” (Sachs.)

Fortunately, the West Village is a seller’s market. Berdoff sold me on the neighborhood as we sat in his living room — a little more bare than it had been, his roommate having already moved out. (“It looks like a crack den in here,” Berdoff joked.) “I love Greenwich Ave. So many good places to eat,” he said. “But storefront space is so expensive to keep that very six months, three of your favorite restaurants are gone. And there are three new ones.” He added, “It’s continually evolving.”

A potential tenant’s application was approved on Tuesday.

101 West 12th Street, #8D
$2,800/month
430 square feet
Studio, co-op

Since 2011, Anjali Mangalgiri and her husband Vickram have been splitting their time between India, Singapore, and Greenwich Village. Anjali is the director of a sustainable development start-up based in India; Vickram is a partner at a hedge fund in Singapore. Now, after four years, they’ve decided to rent out their studio in a co-op on the corner of West 12th Street and 6th Avenue.

The couple lived in their four-hundred-and-thirty-square-foot studio from 2005 to 2008. They bought it just after getting married. At the time, it was just one big — well, not so big — room. The couple built out a wall separating the bed from the small living room, removed one of the two closets by the front door and built another in the bedroom. Because the living space is so small, they use the roof — unfortunately closed for the winter — to entertain guests. “You can see all the way to the river,” Mangalgiri said.

“The building is very nice. It’s an old school New York co-op. There are a lot of artists, theater types. It has that Greenwich Village feel,” Mangalgiri said. Incidentally, the building has a name: It is called the John Adams. “The staff has worked here for many years,” she told me. “There’s a full-time doorman and two handymen around the clock. It feels like home — like a community.”

Starting in 2008, they rented the apartment out for two years. In 2011, they started living there again part-time. “We are very global,” Mangalgiri said. “I am very global.” Traveling between Singapore and India will be hard, Anjali said, but “still better than having New York in the mix.” Anjali’s development firm, Grounded, works in Goa, India’s most prosperous state, according to a recent study — a region with abundant greenery that Anjali describes as “an attractive place for second homes.” Grounded’s first home — which, like the John Adams, also has a name: Nivim — was listed in 2013 for seven hundred and forty thousand dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The co-op board is stringent about who may occupy units in the building, Mangalgiri told me. “The board prefers the apartments to be owner-occupied,” she said. “They don’t like pied-a-terres.” As such, prospective renters will have to go through an application process. “They like to know who is living here,” she said. “We would not be able to Airbnb this place.” I asked what the board is looking for in a renter. “Nothing specific,” Mangalgiri paused. “A job?”

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