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      in Music

      Why the Queen of Christmas Refuses to Leave Battery Park City

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      Home is important to Elizabeth Chan: “Every Christmas song I’ve written has been written here.”Elizabeth Chan is very clear on the matter: Christmas is not a competition.“You can love whatever you want about it as much as you want,” Ms. Chan, 42, said. “It’s how much it fills you with joy, and everybody has different levels of joy in their heart. But that doesn’t mean one way of being is better than another.”These are all very reasonable points. Very gracious, too. But there is no altering the fact that Ms. Chan wins Christmas. Hands down. Game, set and match.It is not because she named her daughters Noelle and Eva (for Christmas Eve). Or because the palette of her apartment in Lower Manhattan tilts toward a rich dark red and celadon green. Or because she has half a dozen Advent calendars in heavy rotation. Or even because the fragrance of the liquid hand soap in her kitchen and bathrooms is generally limited to gingerbread, peppermint, pine fir and such. (Ms. Chan stocks up when the holidays are over and everyone else has moved on from spiced plum and winterberry.)“My goal when I write Christmas music is to inspire thoughts of love, family and home to anyone who listens,” said Elizabeth Chan, who lives with her family in a two-bedroom rental in Battery Park City.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesElizabeth Chan, 42Occupation: Composer and performer of Christmas songsA new perspective: “When I became a mother, my music changed immediately, because suddenly the story of the birth of Jesus and the story of trying to find a place for the baby became very relatable.”It’s because of this: Since leaving her job as a marketing executive a decade ago for what, at the time, seemed like a quixotic pursuit, Ms. Chan has written more than 1,000 Christmas songs (she stopped counting at 1,200) in assorted genres — pop, jazz, disco, electronic, you name it — and recorded 12 albums of her holiday-themed compositions. Some have turned up on Billboard’s adult contemporary and holiday charts. She also ghostwrites Christmas songs for performers who need a Santa’s helper.Like its predecessors, her latest collection, “12 Months of Christmas,” released in October, plays around the country in malls and stores like Walmart, Ikea, Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma, providing Ms. Chan with an annual income that she says is in the high six figures — there’s no business like Ho-Ho-Ho business — and prompting some in the industry to refer to her as the Queen of Christmas. (Last year, when Mariah Carey, she of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” filed an application through her company to trademark the phrase “Queen of Christmas” for future use on products like music, perfume, sunglasses and even coconut milk, Ms. Chan opposed the registration, believing that no one should have exclusive and permanents rights to the title. Ultimately, she prevailed.)Ms. Chan’s office, two floors down from the family home, is perennially decked out for Christmas.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesCreatively and fiscally, Ms. Chan has gone far. Geographically, it’s a different story. She grew up in Battery Park City and has remained there even after 9/11 caused many, including her traumatized parents, to relocate.“I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go,” said Ms. Chan, who found a one-bedroom rental blocks away from her childhood apartment. “I thought it was going to be temporary. I think I’ve stayed because every Christmas song I’ve written has been written here.”When Ms. Chan married 13 years ago, her husband, Andy Fraley, who designed her website and also designs her album covers, joined her in the apartment. And when she decided to ditch corporate life and become a struggling artist, the couple stayed put, although it meant making room for six keyboards, three guitars, a ukulele, a Chinese stringed instrument called a gu zheng, speakers and then, eventually, their first child, Noelle, now 5, and the attendant baby paraphernalia. Oh, and did we mention the dog?Four years ago, through a local mothers’ group, Ms. Chan learned that a family in the building was moving to New Jersey and was hoping to find someone to take over their two-bedroom apartment.“My husband went to look at it, and things were in a crazy state of affairs,” Ms. Chan recalled. “There were crayon and magic-marker marks on every wall, and he said, ‘We’ll take it.’ He knew I was never going to leave the neighborhood — that I was never going to leave the building — because it’s home.”Shelves have been stripped of books to make space to display a Lego Christmas Village scene.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesMs. Chan puts a heavy emphasis and great value on home. Many of her songs have the word “home” in the title or the lyrics. Home frequently figures in conversations with her. Dilating on the topic, she gets unapologetically weepy.Even though the family has settled fully into the more spacious apartment — their numbers now include Eva, 2 — Ms. Chan clings to the other space because that, too, is her home. It’s easily identified by the sleigh bell-encrusted Christmas wreath.“In the way you walk into your house and it smells familiar — that’s this place, for me,” she said.There she wraps and hides her children’s Christmas presents, writes songs, does business Zoom calls and records promos for the radio stations that play her music. Ms. Chan gets inspiration from the fully decorated artificial Christmas tree that, like the wreath, remains in place year-round; from the decorative holiday pillows, of which there are many; and from a photo of her maternal grandmother presiding over a Christmas pageant in her village in the Philippines. “She taught me what matters,” Ms. Chan said.“I usually take January off and start writing Christmas songs again in February,” Ms. Chan said.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesOn a Friday morning in early December, the holiday spirit was ascendant two floors up, in the family quarters. The bookshelves had been given over to displays of Lego Christmas Village scenes and a Fisher-Price Little People Nativity set. Red stockings were hung with care over the red-painted wood console. A “Santa Stop Here” tree-topper was ready to be put in place, and the marble-topped dining table where Ms. Chan sat, a decade ago, to map out her business, had been cleared off to make room for a gingerbread house or two.“This is what Christmas looks like to me,” she said, gazing around the living room. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable living anywhere else. Since my songs are focused on love and family and home, uprooting would affect my music.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      in Music

      Rupert Holmes, on Creating a Victorian-Flavored Escape in Upstate NY

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      The artist you know from ‘The Piña Colada Song’ has a new play about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a new novel coming out next year — but still no plans to live in the city.Over the decades, the playwright, novelist and singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes has collected quite the haul of trophies and treasures. They include — deep breath, now — two Tony Awards (for the book and score of his 1985 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”), two Edgar Awards, 16 gold records, and 15 platinum records, including for his 1979 earworm “Escape.” (You undoubtedly know it as “The Piña Colada Song”).In his home studio, Mr. Holmes has a framed thank-you note from Barbra Streisand, for his contributions to her 1975 album “Lazy Afternoon,” as a composer and co-producer, and a signed Rosebud matchbook from Orson Welles, whom he met on a talk show. He also has a piano bench that belonged to Marvin Hamlisch, a gift from Mr. Hamlisch’s widow.But there is one thing that Mr. Holmes does not have — has never had and never wanted to have — despite all of his Times Square-centric pursuits: a permanent address in New York City.“When I’m working on a show, I get some sort of accommodations in Manhattan for a couple of months,” said Mr. Holmes, 75, whose new play, “All Things Equal: The Life & Trials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” will be at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y., from Nov. 3 to Nov. 27, and whose thriller “Murder Your Employer,” the first book in a new series, is due out in February. “But for me, New York has always been a place that’s like a thermonuclear reactor, where everything interesting and exciting happens. And then you want to leave at the end of the day and calm down.”Rupert Holmes, the Tony Award winning writer and composer of the 1985 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and “The Piña Colada Song,” lives with his wife, Liza, in a colonial-style house in Cold Spring, N.Y.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesRupert Holmes, 75Occupation: Playwright, novelist, singer-songwriterLost in translation: “When I was three and a half, my parents told me we were moving from England to a place called Long Island. I thought, ‘Oh, pirates and lagoons.’ And it turned out to be Levittown, Long Island.”In 1980, Mr. Holmes and his wife, Liza, a lawyer, settled in Tenafly, N.J. They had a snug house they loved in a nice community that was within quick reach of the city. But when the couple’s 10-year-old daughter, Wendy, died suddenly from an undiagnosed brain tumor in 1986, “we couldn’t stay there,” he said. “Her friends would walk by the house; her bedroom was empty. We just couldn’t do it. So we moved to Scarsdale.”Again, nice house, quiet street, easy commute. There they stayed for 22 years. “Then, once again, a child issue,” Mr. Holmes said.Timothy, the younger of the couple’s two sons, is “severely autistic,” he said. “He doesn’t have language, really,” and he was aging out of a local care facility. There was an excellent adult-treatment program farther afield, but it was open only to residents of Putnam and Dutchess Counties. Relocating was less than ideal, “but we tried to make the most of it,” he said. “We wanted this to feel like a good thing.”Thirteen years ago, the Holmeses moved to a hillside colonial-style house in Cold Spring, N.Y., where, depending on the room and the window, they could see woods, gardens, the Hudson River, Storm King Mountain, Crows Nest Mountain, West Point or some fine combination.The piano bench in the basement studio once belonged to Marvin Hamlisch, with whom Mr. Holmes collaborated on a stage adaptation of the 1963 movie “The Nutty Professor.”Andy Ryan for The New York TimesThe couple chose Cold Spring in part because of a key resemblance to Nyack, where they both grew up and were high school sweethearts: The main stem in both villages slopes down to the Hudson. The house was also appealing for its proximity to the train station — a 12-minute walk, critical for Mr. Holmes, who has never learned to drive. “One of my eccentricities,” he said.But the move was not without drama. The couple stayed in Scarsdale for several months after closing on the property so that Mr. Holmes could finish a project in Manhattan. It was winter, and the pipes in the new house froze and burst, flooding the place. To focus on the good news, the house was insured. And because they hadn’t yet shuttled their possessions upstate, nothing was lost. Plus, they now had an opportunity to make some design adjustments.Borrowing square footage from a porch, they built a sunroom adjacent to the dining room. On the second floor, a wall between two small bedrooms came down to make a more expansive office for Mr. Holmes. Soil was excavated so that he could have a window — let there be light — in his basement studio. And the powder room was redone in a symphony of black-and-gold lacquer to serve as a color-appropriate backdrop for his many framed gold records. When a plumber comes to do repair work, Mr. Holmes said ruefully, “his quote changes after he’s been in the bathroom.”The British-born Mr. Holmes began life as David Goldstein; he changed his name when he got into the music business in the late 1960s. “Rupert” was a nod to the poet Rupert Brooke. “Holmes” was a tip of the deerstalker to …. well, it’s pretty elementary.A kidney-shaped platform is a favorite spot where Mr. Holmes likes to read al fresco.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesWith its show posters, Hirschfeld caricatures, framed sheet music and shelves of scripts, awards and branded mugs, the house could be viewed as celebration of Mr. Holmes’s life in the entertainment business. But really, it’s a valentine to Victoriana and to Baker Street’s most famous resident.The Victorian hat stand in the foyer sets the tone. Three rare Sherlock Holmes movie posters and an Inverness cape hang in the dining room, along with a painting of the legendary detective and Dr. Watson that Mr. Holmes commissioned. The Victorian cabinet that he and Ms. Holmes bought early in their marriage sits in the living room. A rose-colored globe lamp on a marble-topped Victorian-style table keeps the theme going in the sunroom. A Victorian student lamp helps light the office.Just before the pandemic, Mr. Holmes’s next-door neighbor decided to sell his house and an adjoining parcel of land. “I realized this was the last piece of property in Cold Spring with a view of the Hudson that did not have a house on it,” Mr. Holmes said. “And I was probably the only person in the world who wouldn’t want to develop that land and build a house on it to sell or live in.”The view from the bay window in the living room takes in the Hudson River and Storm King Mountain.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesHe knew that if he didn’t buy the land, someone else would. Hello bulldozers, goodbye expansive water views. “Without a moment’s thought, I offered him well above what he was asking,” he said. “So now I’ve gone from having a house with a small footprint to having around three acres.”Cleared of scrub and weeds, the terrain has become a sloping pocket park complete with a gazebo. A small platform beneath towering oaks is a favored destination for Mr. Holmes when he wants a break. Or, as he once so lucratively put it, an escape.For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      in Television

      Sarah Steele, of ‘The Good Fight,’ on Finding Love in Brooklyn

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      The actress, who plays Marissa Gold on the legal drama, fell hard for her new Brooklyn Heights co-op — and for her new partner, a lawyer.During her 20s, like countless other New Yorkers in that age group, Sarah Steele “bopped around apartments that mostly, you know, weren’t so nice,” she said.Ms. Steele’s résumé of rentals includes studio apartments in Prospect Heights and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as well as a diminutive one-bedroom in Williamsburg that she shared with a longtime (now ex) boyfriend.A few years ago, when a college roommate went through a breakup of her own, “I saw it as an opportunity to live with an old friend. We moved in together in October of 2019, so we did the whole pandemic together basically watching ‘Sex and the City,’” said Ms. Steele, now 33, who plays the fearless secretary turned P.I. turned lawyer Marissa Gold on the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight.” Its sixth and final season begins Sept. 8.The two-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was a strange place: The oversized bathroom with its Jacuzzi and red light seemed to have been conceived with Russian oligarchs in mind. And it was a strange, troublous time.“I haven’t talked about this publicly much, but I had cancer,” Ms. Steele said. “I had a sarcoma in my leg — which, you know, knock on wood, I’m cancer-free now — but I had to have surgery and couldn’t walk for the first, like, two months we were in the apartment.”Sarah Steele, 33Occupation: ActorHome sweet home: “A couple of months ago, there was a really, really long, hard day on ‘The Good Fight,’ where I didn’t get home until like 3:00 in the morning or something. I put my bag down and starting sobbing with gratitude that I have this place.”She continued: “We were like, ‘We are due for some good luck.’ And my roommate got up one day and said, ‘We are both going to find amazing love while we’re in this apartment.’”Sure enough, two months later, both found “incredible partners,” Ms. Steele said. Then, in the summer of 2021, she found an incredible co-op in Brooklyn Heights. And barely a week ago, her incredible partner, Sean Patrick Smith, a lawyer, moved in with her.Sarah Steele, who plays Marissa Gold on the Paramount+ series “The Good Fight,” lives in a two-bedroom co-op on the fifth floor of a walk-up building in Brooklyn Heights. “I walked in and fell completely in love,” she said. Regan Wood for The New York TimesThere are two love stories to unpack here, and one quite stunning coincidence.Love story No. 1 involves the apartment: a light-filled, two-bedroom walk-up with a wall of casement windows in the living room, two decorative fireplaces, a kitchen with a skylight, and a washer and dryer (no more lugging sacks of dirty clothes to the laundromat). But the most persuasive selling point was the array of built-in bookcases. “I was an English major, and I’m totally book-obsessed and so is my partner,” Ms. Steele said.“I walked in and I was like, ‘I really want to buy this place,’” she said. “I asked my parents to come look at it, because I was like, ‘I can’t tell if I’ve just gone insane and can’t see what’s problematic,’ because it is a fifth-floor walk-up. But then my parents came and they were like, ‘Nope, you’re not insane. Get it right now.’”Love story No. 2 stars Mr. Smith, whom Ms. Steele met on Tinder. On their first date, the two learned they were from the same neighborhood outside of Philadelphia. But there was another, far more rom-com-ready real estate connection: The house Ms. Steele grew up in had previously been owned by Mr. Smith’s grandmother, who turned it into a day care center after raising 10 children there.“The plates look like they’re trying to escape,” she said of the wall display in the kitchen.Regan Wood for The New York Times“Through talking to Sean, I was like, ‘Wait, are you talking about this house in Philly where I grew up?’ I was like, ‘Wait, I know your family!’” Ms. Steele recalled. “I told him, ‘I was like 5 years old and putting on a little concert for your grandmother.’”Among Mr. Smith’s contributions to the ornamentation of his new home: a portrait of said grandmother with a background that Ms. Steele recognized as the first floor of her parents’ house. The painting now hangs over the fireplace in the living room.The apartment represents Ms. Steele’s first stab at serious nesting. “Before, it was like, ‘I know I’ll only be here for a couple of years,’” she said. “And when that’s true, you don’t want to buy crazy expensive furniture, because who knows if it’s going to fit in your next place.”A bit at sea, she enlisted the aid of Adam Charlap Hyman, a designer and artist. Their first conversation went something like this:Mr. Charlap Hyman: Could you tell me some things you like in other people’s houses?Ms. Steele: I really like when people hang up Christmas lights all year long.Mr. Charlap Hyman: We’re not doing that.Ms. Steele: OK. Well, I really like tie-dye.Mr. Charlap Hyman: No.The built-in bookcases were a big selling point for Ms. Steele.Regan Wood for The New York TimesBut Mr. Charlap Hyman took note of the bohemian aesthetic his client was after and offered up a version that was, as he put it, classier, with an adroit deployment of patterns on the sofa and on a pair of recently acquired stools. The two had a meeting of the minds about a custom-made daybed under the living room windows (perfect!) and an arrangement of pottery plates on a wall in the kitchen. “They’re awesome,” said Ms. Steele, who independently elected to go with beaded curtains to conceal the washer-dryer unit.“I grew up with a beaded curtain in front of my childhood bedroom,” she said. “But they were pink and plastic, and from Hot Topic.”Star-struck bargain hunters hit pay dirt this past weekend: Ms. Steele and Mr. Smith had a stoop sale to divest themselves of duplicate pots, pans and other kitchenware. But the couple have seamlessly commingled their books, their art (much of it covers the walls of the second bedroom) and their greenery.“But I’m a plant killer,” Ms. Steele confided. “All the ones that look good are Sean’s.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      Jim Steinman’s Gothic Rock Cottage Is For Sale With Most of His Belongings

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      Jim Steinman spent years transforming his Connecticut house into a kind of rock ‘n’ roll museum. Now his friends are trying to sell it — with his belongings intact.Jim Steinman, who died last year at 73, left behind one of the most distinctive catalogs of music in history, filled with chart-topping hits written for the likes of Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler and Celine Dion. With songs ranging from the restless (“All Revved Up With No Place To Go”) to the wrenching (“For Crying Out Loud”), Mr. Steinman spent decades establishing himself as a sophisticated songwriter with the spirit of a teenager.“As far as Jim was concerned, life was about being forever young, and lusting after this and yearning after that,” said David Sonenberg, Mr. Steinman’s longtime friend, manager and now the executor of his estate. “He was going to be 17 forever, and in some ways he was.”But perhaps nothing evokes Mr. Steinman’s legacy like the Connecticut house where he lived alone for some 20 years — a majestic museum of the self, attached to a quaint cottage in the woods of Ridgefield. He spent years expanding and reimagining the house, transforming it into an embodiment of his own eccentric, complicated personality.Jim Steinman, left, and Meat Loaf together in New York in 1978. A year earlier, their collaborative album “Bat Out of Hell,” with songs by Mr. Steinman and vocals by Meat Loaf, sold millions of copies and made them both stars.Michael Putland/Getty Images“The house — it’s a trip, it’s extraordinary, it’s one of a kind,” Mr. Sonenberg said. “People would walk in and their heads would spin.”Mr. Steinman, a lifelong bachelor who had been in declining health for years, left no instructions about what he wanted done with the house after his death. Now his longtime friends are putting the property up for sale — with a provision: It is being sold “as-is,” which in real estate lingo normally means “in terrible condition.” In this case, it means that the sale includes nearly all of Mr. Steinman’s personal belongings, which remain in the house: the gothic furniture, spooky artwork, wall-mounted records, grand piano, even closets full of clothing.“We are going to try to keep Jim’s vision and legacy intact,” said Jacqueline Dillon, Mr. Steinman’s longtime creative assistant and close friend. “Jim has been a pop-culture fixture for 50 years.”Their hope is to sell the house — which, despite its 6,000-odd square feet, has just two bedrooms — to a musician, artist or writer, or someone seeking a creative retreat or performance space. The asking price is $5,555,569 — the $69 is a tribute to Mr. Steinman’s beloved Amherst College, where he graduated with the class of 1969 — and the annual property taxes are around $32,000.The house, with more than 6,000 square feet and two bedrooms, sits on a wooded 1.5-acre lot in Ridgefield, Conn. Mr. Steinman, a reclusive lifelong bachelor, lived there alone.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesMs. Dillon described Mr. Steinman — by all accounts a reclusive, nocturnal introvert — as “super-shy, but always so kind, and with a lightning-quick wit.” She met him three decades ago at a concert, she said, and was soon recruited to launch his website, jimsteinman.com, to connect with fans and to monitor press mentions.She is now helping to oversee the house sale. “This is not a sale where there is a comparable,” she said.As with many of Mr. Steinman’s grandest achievements, the house almost never happened. It was Mr. Sonenberg who found it nearly 30 years ago. Driving through Ridgefield, he spotted the home on a secluded lot of about 1.5 acres and thought it would be perfect for his friend.“The house was so charming,” said Mr. Sonenberg, whose own artistic dreams were dashed after he met Mr. Steinman in the 1970s. “I wrote a song called ‘Pear Tree in the Shade,’” he said. “Jim wrote a song called ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’”Mr. Steinman, who started writing musicals for Joseph Papp at the Public Theater before conquering the pop charts with songs for Meat Loaf’s 1977 smash album “Bat Out of Hell,” was seeking a place to hide away and work. After years of delays, he and Meat Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday) were completing production on “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell,” which (to no one’s expectation but their own) would become one of the best-selling albums of the 1990s.A floor plan of Mr. Steinman’s house in Ridgefield, Conn. William Pitt Sotheby’s International RealtyMr. Sonenberg suggested that Mr. Steinman buy the Ridgefield house: “I said, ‘It’s perfect — you’re by yourself, you never have any guests.’ And he said no, it was too small.”Around that time, while Mr. Steinman was working with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the musical “Whistle Down the Wind,” he visited Lloyd Webber’s manor house, Sydmonton Court, in Hampshire, England, and “was just blown away,” Mr. Sonenberg said.So Mr. Steinman decided to buy the Ridgefield cottage, paying about $425,000, and convert it into a soaring sanctuary, a creation as epic as his music.“It is really special, almost otherworldly,” said Laura Freed Ancona, the listing agent, of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty. “Yes, it was a roof over Jim’s head. But it was also a creative space for him.”Ms. Ancona said the plan now is to start with private and group showings, and to reach out to various arts and cultural organizations, looking for a potential buyer. “We want to cast as wide a net as possible,” she said.The house, Mr. Sonenberg said, could be sold to a school or institution and used for a combination of living, office and performance space.The bedroom includes a desk, sitting area and aquarium. The art on one wall, “Inferno” by Joseph Grazi, shows taxidermic bats flying into the maw of an alligator skull.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesMr. Steinman, who grew up primarily in Hewlett Harbor, on Long Island, moved to Manhattan after graduating from Amherst and was hired by Mr. Papp, who was captivated by songs Mr. Steinman had written for his senior project, a rock musical called “The Dream Engine.” It later morphed into “Neverland,” inspired by Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. (A few years after getting the Public Theater gig, Mr. Steinman, always pitching, wrote a letter to Mr. Papp asserting that “writing and conceiving serious strong musical dramatic works” was something “I really think I can do better than anyone I’ve ever come across or heard about.”)Back then, “his taste in décor was zero,” said Frederick Baron, a college friend, who remembered visiting Mr. Steinman in a spartan apartment with bare walls and a refrigerator holding only leftover pizza and spaghetti.“He lived the life of the mind,” Mr. Baron said. “He had this extraordinary level of creativity. He was truly brilliant. All of his life energy was in that keyboard.”After Mr. Steinman started making serious money, he bought a two-bedroom apartment in a postwar co-op overlooking Central Park. That’s where he met Bonnie Tyler, who would top the charts in 1983 with the Steinman-penned “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” She and her manager were welcomed with a trail of M&Ms leading to his door.Mr. Steinman later used that home mostly as an office and for wine storage, and moved into a rented house in the woods of Putnam County, N.Y., with a bunch of cats.“Jim was a homebody, and being in the city was quite busy for him,” Ms. Dillon said. “He was always being asked to go to people’s shows. Leaving the city removed him from having to do a lot of things. He didn’t go to big events. He let his art do the talking.”He called the Ridgefield cottage “the house that ‘Bat II’ built,” Ms. Dillon said. “Jim used the expression ‘cottage to compound.’” The album opened with the hit “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” with an accompanying video depicting Meat Loaf as a “Beauty and the Beast”-like recluse living alone in a gothic mansion.To expand the house, Mr. Steinman hired Rob Bramhall, a Boston-based architect, eventually spending about $6 million. Mr. Bramhall worked on the project for the better part of a decade, more than doubling the house’s size. After their initial meeting, Mr. Bramhall sent Mr. Steinman a book by the influential California architect Bernard Maybeck, he said, and “Jim knew I got his sensibility.”The style was English Cotswolds. “Jim wanted the gables, from left to right, to become slightly larger,” he said. “I remember doing skull-and-crossbones for the faucets in the powder room off the great room. Some of the wall light fixtures were made from aircraft parts.”Mr. Steinman, who composed primarily using a keyboard and a tape recorder, was living in a postwar co-op near Central Park West when he borrowed this boom box from his friends, the actors Larry Dilg and Mimi Kennedy.Mimi KennedyAlthough Mr. Bramhall met with Mr. Steinman in Manhattan and helped him select and place the artwork, “Jim never saw the house until it was done,” he said. “It was a fun and interesting project. I haven’t done anything like it since.”The original part of the house — bright and sunny — includes a large living room with Mr. Steinman’s many gold and platinum albums on the wall, open to an equally large kitchen with a dining nook. There’s a laundry room and a sunroom, although Mr. Steinman preferred the dark.“That end of the house represented normalcy to him,” Ms. Dillon said.In the dining room, the table is set with Mr. Steinman’s china, in the Royal Copenhagen Fairy Tale pattern — not that he ever used it. He preferred to eat off disposable tableware, specifically blue Solo cups and Chinet plates.In the den, or “viewing room,” he enjoyed watching singing competitions like “American Idol,” and critiquing the judges. He also watched cooking shows, Yankees games and “Jeopardy!”“He could listen to music, watch a TV show and type a letter” all at once, Ms. Dillon said. “His mind never stopped working.”The “Ring Room,” unadorned but for four statues on the walls, marks the transition from the original building to the addition.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesThe “good room” — not to be confused with the great room — holds one of his wheelchairs, which he needed after suffering a series of strokes. Of course, “it was a crazy wheelchair, like a Batmobile,” Mr. Sonenberg said.Mr. Steinman referred to the unused guest room as the “Wendy Bedroom,” after the heroine of “Peter Pan.” The plush bear on the bed hails from the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, in London, which owns the intellectual property rights to “Peter Pan” and denied Mr. Steinman’s request to stage a rock musical based on the story, deeming the script — which opened with killer nuns — unsuitable for children.The addition, all custom made and filled with elaborate and peculiar art and artifacts, starts with the Ring Room, a small, oval space unfurnished save for sculptures on the walls, which are a color Mr. Steinman called obsidian blue. (Obsidian was the name he gave to Neverland’s city.) The ceiling is dotted with LED stars.“And that leads you from this sweet cottage into this other universe, which is modeled after Steinman’s vision,” Mr. Sonenberg said. “Jim was the most bizarre guy, but he was the sweetest and funniest and most generous. He was the only genius I ever met.”The primary suite is at the end of a wardrobe hallway, where the vast closets still hold Mr. Steinman’s many clothes, few of which he wore, although candy wrappers remain in some of the pockets. So many garments are crammed on the racks that “you would think you were in Bonwit Teller,” Mr. Sonenberg said.Jim Steinman in Manhattan in 1981. He became a star after writing the songs for Meat Loaf’s smash 1977 album “Bat Out of Hell,” and hit it big again with the 1993 sequel, “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell.”Gary Gershoff/Getty ImagesParallel to the wardrobe hallway is a long corridor leading to the great room, lined with patent leather panels and used by visitors — most recently, those working on “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical,” which is touring in Britain and is slated to open in Las Vegas in September.The enormous bedroom includes a desk, sitting area and aquarium. The art on one wall, “Inferno” by Joseph Grazi, depicts taxidermic bats flying into the maw of an alligator skull. Much of the idiosyncratic art Mr. Steinman collected was by artists from Bayreuth, Germany, the longtime home and final resting place of his idol, the composer Richard Wagner, whose operas enthralled him from childhood. The room is also adorned with items collected from fans and, on the bed, a heart pillow in tribute to the surgeon who extended Mr. Steinman’s life.Beyond the bedroom is the house’s focal point, the great room, centered around a stainless steel sculpture resembling a cluster of giant quartz crystals — an allusion to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Mr. Steinman’s 2013 honorary doctorate from Amherst is on display. A bust of Wagner sits atop a Yamaha piano, although Mr. Steinman composed mostly on keyboards. “He had this uncanny ability to play all the parts on the piano,” Ms. Dillon said. “It almost sounded like a full band.”Stairs ascend to a gallery overlooking the room. One chair is occupied by a skeleton mid-shriek. Another flight leads to the room at the top, with a skylight and reading chair.Mr. Steinman often used the tiny kitchenette off the great room, stocked with fresh fruit and cans of Progresso soup. He was a fan of hot sauce, sweet soda and chewy candy. “When I visited him for the first time in his home, he had these containers of gummy bears from the pick-n-mix selection at Dean & DeLuca for $12.99 a pound,” Ms. Dillon said. “Every month, we would get a bill.”The custom-designed wheelchair, which Mr. Steinman required as his health declined, was his version of a Batmobile.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesThe detached two-story garage has plumbing and electricity, and could possibly be an accessory dwelling unit. Mr. Steinman used it for storage — he didn’t drive or have a license. Despite his love of motorcycles (and songs about them), he likely never rode one. Instead, he filled the garage with copies of his programs and Playbills. “He liked stuff,” Ms. Dillon said.The question is: Will anyone want Jim Steinman’s stuff? Ms. Ancona is hoping that the property, like Mr. Steinman’s music, will inspire someone looking for something beautiful and a little strange.“Every house needs its own approach, whether it’s a $500,000 home or a $5 million home,” she said. “You really have to find your audience.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      in Music

      A Gothic Rock Cottage Fit for a Bat Out of Hell

      by

      Jim Steinman spent years transforming his Connecticut house into a kind of rock ‘n’ roll museum. Now his friends are trying to sell it — with his belongings intact.Jim Steinman, who died last year at 73, left behind one of the most distinctive catalogs of music in history, filled with chart-topping hits written for the likes of Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler and Celine Dion. With songs ranging from the restless (“All Revved Up With No Place To Go”) to the wrenching (“For Crying Out Loud”), Mr. Steinman spent decades establishing himself as a sophisticated songwriter with the spirit of a teenager.“As far as Jim was concerned, life was about being forever young, and lusting after this and yearning after that,” said David Sonenberg, Mr. Steinman’s longtime friend, manager and now the executor of his estate. “He was going to be 17 forever, and in some ways he was.”But perhaps nothing evokes Mr. Steinman’s legacy like the Connecticut house where he lived alone for some 20 years — a majestic museum of the self, attached to a quaint cottage in the woods of Ridgefield. He spent years expanding and reimagining the house, transforming it into an embodiment of his own eccentric, complicated personality.Jim Steinman, left, and Meat Loaf together in New York in 1978. A year earlier, their collaborative album “Bat Out of Hell,” with songs by Mr. Steinman and vocals by Meat Loaf, sold millions of copies and made them both stars.Michael Putland/Getty Images“The house — it’s a trip, it’s extraordinary, it’s one of a kind,” Mr. Sonenberg said. “People would walk in and their heads would spin.”Mr. Steinman, a lifelong bachelor who had been in declining health for years, left no instructions about what he wanted done with the house after his death. Now his longtime friends are putting the property up for sale — with a provision: It is being sold “as-is,” which in real estate lingo normally means “in terrible condition.” In this case, it means that the sale includes nearly all of Mr. Steinman’s personal belongings, which remain in the house: the gothic furniture, spooky artwork, wall-mounted records, grand piano, even closets full of clothing.“We are going to try to keep Jim’s vision and legacy intact,” said Jacqueline Dillon, Mr. Steinman’s longtime creative assistant and close friend. “Jim has been a pop-culture fixture for 50 years.”Their hope is to sell the house — which, despite its 6,000-odd square feet, has just two bedrooms — to a musician, artist or writer, or someone seeking a creative retreat or performance space. The asking price is $5,555,569 — the $69 is a tribute to Mr. Steinman’s beloved Amherst College, where he graduated with the class of 1969 — and the annual property taxes are around $32,000.The house, with more than 6,000 square feet and two bedrooms, sits on a wooded 1.5-acre lot in Ridgefield, Conn. Mr. Steinman, a reclusive lifelong bachelor, lived there alone.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesMs. Dillon described Mr. Steinman — by all accounts a reclusive, nocturnal introvert — as “super-shy, but always so kind, and with a lightning-quick wit.” She met him three decades ago at a concert, she said, and was soon recruited to launch his website, jimsteinman.com, to connect with fans and to monitor press mentions.She is now helping to oversee the house sale. “This is not a sale where there is a comparable,” she said.As with many of Mr. Steinman’s grandest achievements, the house almost never happened. It was Mr. Sonenberg who found it nearly 30 years ago. Driving through Ridgefield, he spotted the home on a secluded lot of about 1.5 acres and thought it would be perfect for his friend.“The house was so charming,” said Mr. Sonenberg, whose own artistic dreams were dashed after he met Mr. Steinman in the 1970s. “I wrote a song called ‘Pear Tree in the Shade,’” he said. “Jim wrote a song called ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’”Mr. Steinman, who started writing musicals for Joseph Papp at the Public Theater before conquering the pop charts with songs for Meat Loaf’s 1977 smash album “Bat Out of Hell,” was seeking a place to hide away and work. After years of delays, he and Meat Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday) were completing production on “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell,” which (to no one’s expectation but their own) would become one of the best-selling albums of the 1990s.A floor plan of Mr. Steinman’s house in Ridgefield, Conn. William Pitt Sotheby’s International RealtyMr. Sonenberg suggested that Mr. Steinman buy the Ridgefield house: “I said, ‘It’s perfect — you’re by yourself, you never have any guests.’ And he said no, it was too small.”Around that time, while Mr. Steinman was working with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the musical “Whistle Down the Wind,” he visited Lloyd Webber’s manor house, Sydmonton Court, in Hampshire, England, and “was just blown away,” Mr. Sonenberg said.So Mr. Steinman decided to buy the Ridgefield cottage, paying about $425,000, and convert it into a soaring sanctuary, a creation as epic as his music.“It is really special, almost otherworldly,” said Laura Freed Ancona, the listing agent, of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty. “Yes, it was a roof over Jim’s head. But it was also a creative space for him.”Ms. Ancona said the plan now is to start with private and group showings, and to reach out to various arts and cultural organizations, looking for a potential buyer. “We want to cast as wide a net as possible,” she said.The house, Mr. Sonenberg said, could be sold to a school or institution and used for a combination of living, office and performance space.The bedroom includes a desk, sitting area and aquarium. The art on one wall, “Inferno” by Joseph Grazi, shows taxidermic bats flying into the maw of an alligator skull.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesMr. Steinman, who grew up primarily in Hewlett Harbor, on Long Island, moved to Manhattan after graduating from Amherst and was hired by Mr. Papp, who was captivated by songs Mr. Steinman had written for his senior project, a rock musical called “The Dream Engine.” It later morphed into “Neverland,” inspired by Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. (A few years after getting the Public Theater gig, Mr. Steinman, always pitching, wrote a letter to Mr. Papp asserting that “writing and conceiving serious strong musical dramatic works” was something “I really think I can do better than anyone I’ve ever come across or heard about.”)Back then, “his taste in décor was zero,” said Frederick Baron, a college friend, who remembered visiting Mr. Steinman in a spartan apartment with bare walls and a refrigerator holding only leftover pizza and spaghetti.“He lived the life of the mind,” Mr. Baron said. “He had this extraordinary level of creativity. He was truly brilliant. All of his life energy was in that keyboard.”After Mr. Steinman started making serious money, he bought a two-bedroom apartment in a postwar co-op overlooking Central Park. That’s where he met Bonnie Tyler, who would top the charts in 1983 with the Steinman-penned “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” She and her manager were welcomed with a trail of M&Ms leading to his door.Mr. Steinman later used that home mostly as an office and for wine storage, and moved into a rented house in the woods of Putnam County, N.Y., with a bunch of cats.“Jim was a homebody, and being in the city was quite busy for him,” Ms. Dillon said. “He was always being asked to go to people’s shows. Leaving the city removed him from having to do a lot of things. He didn’t go to big events. He let his art do the talking.”He called the Ridgefield cottage “the house that ‘Bat II’ built,” Ms. Dillon said. “Jim used the expression ‘cottage to compound.’” The album opened with the hit “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” with an accompanying video depicting Meat Loaf as a “Beauty and the Beast”-like recluse living alone in a gothic mansion.To expand the house, Mr. Steinman hired Rob Bramhall, a Boston-based architect, eventually spending about $6 million. Mr. Bramhall worked on the project for the better part of a decade, more than doubling the house’s size. After their initial meeting, Mr. Bramhall sent Mr. Steinman a book by the influential California architect Bernard Maybeck, he said, and “Jim knew I got his sensibility.”The style was English Cotswolds. “Jim wanted the gables, from left to right, to become slightly larger,” he said. “I remember doing skull-and-crossbones for the faucets in the powder room off the great room. Some of the wall light fixtures were made from aircraft parts.”Mr. Steinman, who composed primarily using a keyboard and a tape recorder, was living in a postwar co-op near Central Park West when he borrowed this boom box from his friends, the actors Larry Dilg and Mimi Kennedy.Mimi KennedyAlthough Mr. Bramhall met with Mr. Steinman in Manhattan and helped him select and place the artwork, “Jim never saw the house until it was done,” he said. “It was a fun and interesting project. I haven’t done anything like it since.”The original part of the house — bright and sunny — includes a large living room with Mr. Steinman’s many gold and platinum albums on the wall, open to an equally large kitchen with a dining nook. There’s a laundry room and a sunroom, although Mr. Steinman preferred the dark.“That end of the house represented normalcy to him,” Ms. Dillon said.In the dining room, the table is set with Mr. Steinman’s china, in the Royal Copenhagen Fairy Tale pattern — not that he ever used it. He preferred to eat off disposable tableware, specifically blue Solo cups and Chinet plates.In the den, or “viewing room,” he enjoyed watching singing competitions like “American Idol,” and critiquing the judges. He also watched cooking shows, Yankees games and “Jeopardy!”“He could listen to music, watch a TV show and type a letter” all at once, Ms. Dillon said. “His mind never stopped working.”The “Ring Room,” unadorned but for four statues on the walls, marks the transition from the original building to the addition.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesThe “good room” — not to be confused with the great room — holds one of his wheelchairs, which he needed after suffering a series of strokes. Of course, “it was a crazy wheelchair, like a Batmobile,” Mr. Sonenberg said.Mr. Steinman referred to the unused guest room as the “Wendy Bedroom,” after the heroine of “Peter Pan.” The plush bear on the bed hails from the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, in London, which owns the intellectual property rights to “Peter Pan” and denied Mr. Steinman’s request to stage a rock musical based on the story, deeming the script — which opened with killer nuns — unsuitable for children.The addition, all custom made and filled with elaborate and peculiar art and artifacts, starts with the Ring Room, a small, oval space unfurnished save for sculptures on the walls, which are a color Mr. Steinman called obsidian blue. (Obsidian was the name he gave to Neverland’s city.) The ceiling is dotted with LED stars.“And that leads you from this sweet cottage into this other universe, which is modeled after Steinman’s vision,” Mr. Sonenberg said. “Jim was the most bizarre guy, but he was the sweetest and funniest and most generous. He was the only genius I ever met.”The primary suite is at the end of a wardrobe hallway, where the vast closets still hold Mr. Steinman’s many clothes, few of which he wore, although candy wrappers remain in some of the pockets. So many garments are crammed on the racks that “you would think you were in Bonwit Teller,” Mr. Sonenberg said.Jim Steinman in Manhattan in 1981. He became a star after writing the songs for Meat Loaf’s smash 1977 album “Bat Out of Hell,” and hit it big again with the 1993 sequel, “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell.”Gary Gershoff/Getty ImagesParallel to the wardrobe hallway is a long corridor leading to the great room, lined with patent leather panels and used by visitors — most recently, those working on “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical,” which is touring in Britain and is slated to open in Las Vegas in September.The enormous bedroom includes a desk, sitting area and aquarium. The art on one wall, “Inferno” by Joseph Grazi, depicts taxidermic bats flying into the maw of an alligator skull. Much of the idiosyncratic art Mr. Steinman collected was by artists from Bayreuth, Germany, the longtime home and final resting place of his idol, the composer Richard Wagner, whose operas enthralled him from childhood. The room is also adorned with items collected from fans and, on the bed, a heart pillow in tribute to the surgeon who extended Mr. Steinman’s life.Beyond the bedroom is the house’s focal point, the great room, centered around a stainless steel sculpture resembling a cluster of giant quartz crystals — an allusion to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Mr. Steinman’s 2013 honorary doctorate from Amherst is on display. A bust of Wagner sits atop a Yamaha piano, although Mr. Steinman composed mostly on keyboards. “He had this uncanny ability to play all the parts on the piano,” Ms. Dillon said. “It almost sounded like a full band.”Stairs ascend to a gallery overlooking the room. One chair is occupied by a skeleton mid-shriek. Another flight leads to the room at the top, with a skylight and reading chair.Mr. Steinman often used the tiny kitchenette off the great room, stocked with fresh fruit and cans of Progresso soup. He was a fan of hot sauce, sweet soda and chewy candy. “When I visited him for the first time in his home, he had these containers of gummy bears from the pick-n-mix selection at Dean & DeLuca for $12.99 a pound,” Ms. Dillon said. “Every month, we would get a bill.”The custom-designed wheelchair, which Mr. Steinman required as his health declined, was his version of a Batmobile.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesThe detached two-story garage has plumbing and electricity, and could possibly be an accessory dwelling unit. Mr. Steinman used it for storage — he didn’t drive or have a license. Despite his love of motorcycles (and songs about them), he likely never rode one. Instead, he filled the garage with copies of his programs and Playbills. “He liked stuff,” Ms. Dillon said.The question is: Will anyone want Jim Steinman’s stuff? Ms. Ancona is hoping that the property, like Mr. Steinman’s music, will inspire someone looking for something beautiful and a little strange.“Every house needs its own approach, whether it’s a $500,000 home or a $5 million home,” she said. “You really have to find your audience.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      in Theater

      Michael R. Jackson, in a Place All His Own in Washington Heights

      by

      The Tony- and Pulitzer-winning author of ‘A Strange Loop’ finally has an apartment to himself in Manhattan.It had to be around here someplace, but Michael R. Jackson could not readily locate his Pulitzer Prize certificate when an importuning visitor asked for a look. He rummaged through piles of paper on a closet shelf. Not there. He inventoried the plastic storage boxes in that same closet, but came up empty again.“It was, like, in a cardboard folder. What did I do with it? What did I actually do with it?” Mr. Jackson said, casting about his two-bedroom condo sublet in Washington Heights and looking stricken. “I could not have thrown it away. This is now going to torture me for the rest of my life.”Do not judge. Do not “tsk-tsk” about carelessness. Of late, it has been a wild loop-the-loop ride for Mr. Jackson, 41, the author and composer of “A Strange Loop,” the hit Broadway show. The metafictional chronicle of an overweight, gay Black man writing a musical about an overweight, gay Black man, “Loop” won the 2022 Tony Award for best book of a musical and the Tony for best musical, to say nothing of the 2020 Pulitzer for drama. (The errant document eventually turned up atop a bookcase in the second bedroom, near photographs taken by Jill Krementz of Mr. Jackson’s proud parents at the opening-night performance of “A Strange Loop” and of the playwright himself during the opening-night curtain call.)“I’ve been traveling so much. I’ve been doing press and running in and out for the last two months,” Mr. Jackson said. “It was, ‘Throw this suit on! Take that suit off!’ It was like a cartoon, clothes flying left and right, and me running out the door.”“It just doesn’t feel like you’re in the city,” said Michael R. Jackson of his Washington Heights neighborhood.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesMichael R. Jackson, 41Occupation: Playwright and composerDesignated designer: “I hated every second of choosing furniture. This is the kind of thing I’m just not interested in. I want it to be done. I just want to be at a point where I can appoint a person who knows me really well and knows my taste to do their thing.”“The apartment was starting to look like a crack den, and I had to bring my attention to cleaning,” he continued. “I got the housekeeper to come yesterday, and we sort of tag-teamed, but there was still a lot to do.”Mr. Jackson moved into his current quarters in May 2021. For the preceding 16 years, he lived around the corner, in a crepuscular three-bedroom rental with a rotating cast of apartment mates, minimal furniture and — for the first few months of the pandemic, thanks to an issue with a gas line — an out-of-commission stove.“It was cheaper to live there, but it just got sort of painful to me personally. I’m not as young as I once was,” Mr. Jackson said. “I was like, ‘I want to live alone.’”Mr. Jackson enlisted the set designer of “A Strange Loop,” Arnulfo Maldonado, to help furnish the apartment.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesHe was determined to stay in the neighborhood — “I find this to be a peaceful space” — but seemed uncertain about the process of securing new housing or, more likely, was just too busy to engage. Accordingly, the lead producer of “A Strange Loop,” Barbara Whitman, recommended Bohemia Realty Group, a niche agency that caters to the New York theater community and specializes in rentals and sales in the northern precincts of Manhattan.The floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room and the views of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge from the compact balcony were all that a certain prospective tenant could desire. The roof deck was value added.“I’m a big fan of sunlight and windows, which I did not have in my old place, which for 16 years was so distressing to me,” said Mr. Jackson, who was also impressed with the primary bathroom. “It’s the nicest I’ve ever had, and I don’t have to share it with anyone.”The weighted blanket — lots of loops — has proved a favorite.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe décor is a crucial step up from Ikea — anodyne good taste, in shades of sienna and blue-gray, with a pop of burnt orange. The weighted Afghan on the ottoman, a true security blanket, adds texture.“I’ve always sort of lived like a college student,” Mr. Jackson said. “And so when I was able to upgrade a bit, I needed some help to figure out some basic things.”Arnulfo Maldonado, the set designer for “A Strange Loop,” became the furniture whisperer, presenting various options to his decidedly low-maintenance client.“I said, ‘I need a couch,’ and Arnulfo said, ‘You need a rug under the couch,’” Mr. Jackson recalled. “It would never have occurred to me to put a rug underneath the couch.”Perhaps more to the point, it would not have occurred to him to buy a rug.Mr. Jackson borrowed the soap opera magazines from his neighbor, Florencia Lozano, who was, for a time, part of the cast of the daytime drama “One Life to Live.”Desiree Rios/The New York Times“I do not have an interior-design bone in my body,” said Mr. Jackson, who vows to raise his game when he buys a house — something he hopes will happen in the next few years. “I couldn’t tell you whether I prefer neo-Classical to neo-non-Classical. I don’t know any of that. It isn’t something I’ve ever had to think about.”Of course, he has his discrete spheres of expertise. He waxes Talmudic on what he calls his trifecta of “Inner White Girl Inspirations.” Said trifecta comprises a framed poster of Joni Mitchell’s “Dog Eat Dog” album, which hangs over the sofa; a signed vinyl copy of Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville,” an opening-night gift from his agent (“This put Liz Phair on the map,” he said. “It blew the roof off the indie rock scene at the time — it’s a really iconic album”); and a vinyl copy of Tori Amos’s “Under the Pink.”“The first song on the album is ‘Pretty Good Year,’ and when I sat down to listen to it in high school, it really changed the game for me in terms of the kind of art I wanted to be making as a writer,” Mr. Jackson said. “She opened up a whole world of thought for me.”He is similarly steeped in the fine points of daytime dramas. “I was a huge soap person,” he said. “I watched all of them, or most of them. I had a subscription to Soap Opera Digest. I came to New York initially to become a soap opera writer. I interned at ‘All My Children’; I interned at ABC Daytime.”During lockdown, Mr. Jackson was able to rewatch many of the sin-and-suffering-in-the-afternoon episodes he had recorded years earlier, courtesy of the still-functioning TV-VCR combo his father bought him just before his freshman year in college.“I’m trying to wrap my mind around the idea that I have more money and time now, and I should put my attention to developing home-décor taste,” he said.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesWithout fanfare, he sat down at the Yamaha keyboard in the second bedroom and played a lovely stretch of melody from “White Girl in Danger,” a musical in development that is drawn in part from his love of soaps.“I do think having a nice setup does make me feel less stressed when I’m working, which is good,” Mr. Jackson said. But he insisted that his previous apartment, gloomy though it may have been, did not impede the progress of “A Strange Loop.”“It didn’t matter,” he said. “My whole life was writing all the time and working on the piece. I had to write. I had to get it done.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Television

      The Wild History of the Real ‘Only Murders’ Building

      by

      Viewers of the Hulu series know it as the Arconia, but the Upper West Side building has a name — and a dramatic story — of its own.Fans of the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building,” which returns for its second season this week, know the building at the center of the drama as the Arconia, where Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez play an unlikely trio of residents who become amateur sleuths with a podcast. But the Renaissance-style apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is actually called the Belnord, and it has been making headlines for more than a century.The creators of “Only Murders in the Building” renamed the building the Arconia for the Hulu series, which stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, above, and Selena Gomez as an unlikely trio of residents who become amateur sleuths with a podcast.Craig Blankenhorn/HuluFrom the get-go, the Belnord was a newsmaker — an edifice of excess, a home for hyperbole. When it was finished in 1909, covering a full city block at West 86th Street and Broadway, the architect boasted that it was the largest apartment building in the country, and maybe the world. Newspapers, including this one, touted the interior courtyard as the biggest in Manhattan — a half acre of open space, with a garden and a lawn “for a score of children to romp on,” crowned with a bountiful, tiered marble fountain.They marveled at its capacious rental apartments, 175 of them, each 50 feet deep, stretching from street to courtyard, with interior decoration “in the style of Louis XVI” — pale, painted paneling and “harmoniously tinted silks” on the walls — and the most up-to-date modern conveniences. The refrigerators had ice machines, so no iceman would ever invade the Belnord, as one paper put it. On the roof, each apartment had a private laundry, a low-tech luxury that included a tub, ironing board and clothesline — for the convenience of one’s maid.It would be its own city, this paper noted, with a population of more than 1,500. Over the years, there were notable tenants: Lee Strasberg, the dictatorial father of Method acting, who was often visited by his shy protégée Marilyn Monroe; Walter Matthau, when he was an up-and-coming theater actor with a young family; the actor Zero Mostel, who played Tevye in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof”; and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning author, who liked to jog around the courtyard in a three-piece suit.When the Belnord was built in 1909, its architect, H. Hobart Weekes, of Hiss & Weekes, boasted that it was the largest apartment building in the country.via The New York Public LibraryBut by the 1970s, that city was in chaos. The ornate limestone-and-terra-cotta structure was crumbling, the roof was leaking and the plumbing cracked. Ceilings were collapsing. Stalactites, The New York Times reported in 1980, had formed in the basement. The fountain had been broken for years, and the garden was a fenced-in jungle, off limits to residents.The building’s owner, Lillian Seril, would earn the dubious distinction of being one of the city’s worst landlords: By all accounts, she was both litigious and recalcitrant, refusing to fix even the simplest issues, but energetic enough to sue not only her tenants but also the landlord association that threw her out for not paying her dues. (Tenants recalled buying their own refrigerators and sneaking them in with the help of sympathetic building staff, because Mrs. Seril would not allow their broken appliances to be repaired or replaced.)The Belnord’s residents, many of whom paid just a few hundred dollars a month for their enormous, house-like apartments, organized and revolted. In 1978, they began what would be the longest rent strike in the city’s history.For the 16 years that it went on, the Belnord battle was so contentious that one housing court judge declared that the two sides deserved each other, before washing his hands of the case when a settlement he had brokered collapsed. “I’m convinced the tenants and the owner are going to litigate the building to death,” he said. A city official likened the situation to the siege of Beirut.LEFT: When the building was constructed, The New York Times touted the courtyard’s lawn as a space for “a score of children to romp on.” RIGHT: Gary Barnett, the developer who bought the building in 1994, spent $100 million restoring it and also resuscitated the fountain at enormous expense.From left: via The Belnord; Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe battle ended in 1994, when the developer Gary Barnett, who was then only 38, bought the building with a group of investors for $15 million. (As part of the deal, Mrs. Seril insisted on retaining a 3,000-square-foot rent-controlled apartment for herself — at her death, in 2004, she was paying just $450 a month.) A decade later, Mr. Barnett and his company, Extell Development, would build One57, the funnel-shaped, blue-glass skyscraper on West 57th that was the city’s first supertall tower and, in so doing, incur the ire of preservationists, urban planners and civic groups. But in those years, he was a hero. The Belnord was his first Manhattan property, and he would spend $100 million shoring it up.He made various deals with individual tenants as he attempted to turn the place into a luxury rental building, with some apartments that leased for up to $45,000 a month. For a rabbi and his family who were paying $275 for a 4,000-square-foot apartment, Mr. Barnett bought a house in the New Jersey suburbs. Then there was the penthouse dweller who hankered for the desert: He flew her to Las Vegas to pick out a house with a pool, arranged for its purchase and paid her moving expenses. Other tenants opted to keep their low rents, but agreed to swap their vast, 11-room apartments for smaller ones.Mr. Barnett once joked that the fountain he had resuscitated at enormous expense — a project that involved disassembling and carting it away for repairs — was the fountain of youth, because nobody ever seemed to die at the Belnord.“It was a labor of love to restore that building,” he said recently. “But I didn’t really understand what I was getting into. It was quite a picture.”LEFT: A detail of an iron gate that Mr. Barnett restored in the 1990s. “It was a labor of love to restore that building,” he said recently. “But I didn’t really understand what I was getting into.” RIGHT: Through the gilded B, you can see the mosaic on a vaulted entrance.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesBy 2015, Mr. Barnett was out of the picture, in a deal worth a reported $575 million.Like everything else at the Belnord, the terms of Mr. Barnett’s mortgage had been problematic, and for a time, after he stopped making the loan payments, the city classified the property as “distressed.” (The calculus of the building’s debt and its rental revenue never quite added up.) And so a new group of investors swooped in — the cast of which kept changing, as various players dropped out because of insolvency, lawsuits and other calamities — to turn the place into a high-end condominium, converting the 100 or so available apartments into showplaces with Italian kitchens sheathed in marble.Robert A.M. Stern, the architect whose firm handled the conversion, described the process as “a very high-class Botox treatment.”Prices for the revamped units ranged from about $3.6 million to more than $11 million, although some tenants bought their own apartments at deep discounts. After a rocky start, the condos are now selling briskly, keeping pace with the high-end market in the city, said Jonathan Miller, the veteran property and market appraiser.And now the Belnord is once again in the limelight, thanks to the Hulu series. John Hoffman, who created the show with Mr. Martin, was delighted and stunned to have scored the place for his production, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. While the atmospheric apartments of Mr. Martin, Mr. Short and Ms. Gomez’s characters were built on a sound stage, the story needed a building like the Belnord, with its grand appointments and panopticon of a courtyard.“I was obsessed,” Mr. Hoffman said. “I knew we could make something as elevated as that amazing building. It’s a cliché to say that the building itself is a character, but I like the challenge of getting beyond that cliché a bit. What pulls us out of our apartments to meet people? How well do you know your neighbors? Do you only connect when it’s necessary? The ways in which we get pulled together when we live in these spaces is what’s really interesting.”Debbie Marx grew up in the classic seven where she now lives — a time capsule of 1959, the year her parents moved into the building. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne Friday evening in early June, Debbie Marx, a Latin teacher and longtime Belnord resident, led a visitor through her unrenovated classic seven, its meandering, book-lined hallways a time capsule from 1959, the year her parents moved in. Her father, Josef Marx, was an oboist and musicologist who had his own music publishing company; her mother, Angelina, had been a ballerina. Ms. Marx moved back into her childhood apartment in the late 1980s, when she was pregnant with her first child and her mother was living there alone. Ms. Marx’s father had died in 1978, a victim, in a way, of the Belnord battle, having suffered a heart attack in the courthouse during a hearing with his fellow tenants.Ms. Marx recalled growing up in the building — playing handball in the courtyard, which was forbidden by Mrs. Seril, and slipping through the bars of the fence to the off-limits garden, by then a riot of shrubs and trees. She had her own courtyard gang, with Walter Matthau’s daughter Jenny and others, but their transgressions were mild: nicking the hat from a doorman, commandeering the service elevator, dropping the odd water bomb.“It’s like an archaeological site,” Richard Stengel said of the building. “The further you burrow down, you get a different culture and history.”Mr. Stengel, the author, journalist and former State Department official, has been a tenant since 1992, when he moved into an apartment that had been charred by a fire and left vacant for years. (If you see Mr. Stengel on MSNBC, where he is a contributor, with a deep red bookshelf behind him, he is broadcasting from his apartment at the Belnord.)John Scanlon, the wily public relations man who died in 2001, was also a ’90s-era tenant. In those days, Mr. Scanlon was embroiled in another long-running New York City real estate battle: the first Trump divorce. (He was Ivana Trump’s spokesman.)Like Mr. Stengel, Mr. Scanlon was a member of a Belnord demographic that you might call literary-and-publishing adjacent. He liked to tease Mr. Stengel, who was then the editor of Time magazine, when they collided in the courtyard: “How does it feel to be on the cutting edge of the passé?”LEFT: A Renaissance-style mosaic at the building’s entrance. The entire structure was landmarked in 1966. RIGHT: Debbie Marx and her son, Nicolas Held, in the courtyard.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesEarlier waves of tenants included Jewish European émigrés, unreconstructed Socialists and scores of psychoanalysts.“When we moved in, it had the feel of an Eastern European shtetl,” said Peter Krulewitch, a real estate investor who arrived 35 years ago with his wife, Deborah, a retired Estee Lauder executive, and soon formed what became known as the Belnord 18, one of the many splinter groups of building tenants who tried to negotiate with Mrs. Seril. “There were these wonderful aging lefties that had been there for years — and fought Mrs. Seril for years.”In many cases, those tenants had succession rights for their children. So despite the influx of condo buyers, Mr. Krulewitch said, the Belnord is a city that still — although just barely — has a population more culturally varied than the monolithic moneyed class that has taken over much of Manhattan.As Mr. Krulewitch put it, “It has been quite an adventure.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      Melissa Gilbert and Tim Busfield, on Their Upstate Escape

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      The ‘Little House on the Prairie’ star, who has a new memoir out, and her husband, the actor and director, collaborated happily on their Sullivan County retreat. Just don’t ask about the pleather recliner.Almost immediately after Melissa Gilbert and Tim Busfield married in 2013 — the third time for both of them — they swapped the glitter and hustle of Los Angeles for the low-key charms of small-town life in Mr. Busfield’s native Michigan.The experience was a tonic, for sure, but a five-year dose was sufficient. In 2018, Ms. Gilbert, who became a household name at the age of 10 as a star of the long-running series “Little House on the Prairie,” and Mr. Busfield, who is best known for his role on “The West Wing” and his Emmy-winning turn on “Thirtysomething,” relocated to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.Ms. Gilbert, now 58, was quickly cast in “The Dead, 1904,” an immersive theater adaptation of the James Joyce novella. Mr. Busfield, now 64, who is also a director, found work on TV shows like “Law & Order: SVU.”Gainful employment was all well and good, but Mr. Busfield, in particular, felt a lack in the fresh-air department. As Ms. Gilbert writes in her new memoir, “Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered,” “It became important for us to have a place where we could escape.”A Zillow search led them to Highland Lake, N.Y., a dot on the map in Sullivan County.The actor and former child star Melissa Gilbert, and her husband, the actor and director Tim Busfield, bought a house in Sullivan County in 2019. They call it “the cabbage,” an amalgam of “cabin” and “cottage.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMelissa Gilbert, 58, and Tim Busfield, 64Occupations: She is an actor and writer; he is an actor and director.Big leap of faith on the prairie: “This is one of those places that most people would say, ‘Are you nuts?’ if you expressed interest in buying it,” Ms. Gilbert said. “But Tim and I are the best kind of nuts. We’re hopeful visionaries. We knew this house would shelter us well and serve us well.”What the couple found in their price range — a small structure with halfhearted half-timbering, peeling stucco and an interior crammed with the detritus of the previous owner — wasn’t pretty. But despite the mice and the mold and the mildew (and that awful smell), there was potential.The dropped ceiling in the kitchen hid a cathedral ceiling. The loft would prove to be an ideal music room. The living room had pine paneling and a fireplace. And the 14 bosky acres that came with the ramshackle house were ravishing.“As I stared up at one of the rotting deer heads on the wall, a lifetime of therapy kicked in and I thought I could do something here,” Ms. Gilbert writes in “Back to the Prairie.” “I just had to look past the crap.”Ms. Gilbert, a DIY-er of no mean talent, upholstered the sofa and love seat.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe couple closed on the property in January of 2019, dubbed it “the cabbage,” an amalgam of “cabin” and “cottage,” and began mapping out plans for renovation and design.Money was an issue. A can-do spirit was — and is — the currency. “You see that she has overalls on,” Mr. Busfield said with an affectionate look at his wife. “She’ll have a hammer hanging out of one of those pockets in half an hour.”Just one example (or maybe two): After a protracted search, the couple found a sofa that was perfect in every way except color (an unfortunate shade of asphalt gray), so Ms. Gilbert took a chance on some burgundy slipcovers that she found online and then added other fabrics and cushions to create a whole new piece of furniture. She refreshed a love seat in similar fashion, in that case with a burgundy floral pattern and a checkered dust ruffle. For the record, she has also assembled a windmill ceiling fan and a table saw.But the couple called in the pros when necessary — as in the kitchen, where demolition, plumbing and rewiring were involved. They made a virtue out of the tight budget, conjuring a space that looks, delightfully, like a retro diner.The floating shelves were built with recycled bowling-alley wood and painted bright red, a look the couple loved. Ms. Gilbert added interest to the prefab cabinets by decoupaging their sides with recipes from old magazines. A large slice of corrugated tin roofing was sprayed with vinegar to give it a nicely raddled look, then mounted on a wall to hold the couple’s collection of cast-iron cookware. Chrome-and-red-vinyl chairs ring the farm table. Atop the cabinetry are Donald Duck and Olive Oyl figurines, an old set of Lincoln Logs and a vintage Coca-Cola syrup bottle, among other knickknacks.This is the first time, Ms. Gilbert said, that she has decorated a house with full partner participation. Her default in previous houses and previous marriages was “to do everything myself and go, ‘Ta-da! Here it is.’”If you come to visit, it’s likely that your picture will be snapped and added to the photo wall in the living room.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThat didn’t sit well with Mr. Busfield: “I would just go into whatever house we were in and start to do things, and he would go, ‘Wait a minute. Hello, I’m here.’”They were on the same page about the creation and outfitting of what they call the Woodstock bedroom — the house is a 20-minute drive from the site of the legendary 1969 rock concert. A lava lamp sits on a bureau in the corner, and the wall décor includes a 1960s-themed jigsaw puzzle that the couple assembled, sealed and framed, as well as a poster heralding a concert by The Who.“The room was designed with Pete Townshend in mind,” Mr. Busfield said, referring to the group’s co-founder. “We keep hoping he’ll come by one day and hang out.”The couple were also in agreement about a photo wall of family and friends in the living room. “We have a Polaroid camera that we keep here, and when someone comes to visit or stays over, we take pictures and add them to the wall,” Ms. Gilbert said.Seeing eye to eye is so very satisfying. Marital harmony is such a fine thing. So maybe now isn’t the time to bring up the brown-pleather recliner. Mr. Busfield wanted it and got it. Ms. Gilbert was horrified, she said, and didn’t mince words. She told her husband the chair was horrible, that it was “a grandpa chair.” The long and the short of it: She didn’t want the chair in the house.Mr. Busfield bought the recliner. At first, Ms. Gilbert hated it. Then she co-opted it.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSo guess who won’t budge from the chair now?“I fell in love with it,” Ms. Gilbert said, shamefacedly. “I knit in it. I sleep in it.”“I’ve sat in it maybe twice in the last year and a half,” Mr. Busfield said.Raised beds for an herb-and-vegetable garden and a chicken coop were added during the Covid lockdown in 2020. Seven hens are currently in residence.Last summer, the couple put in new windows and painted the exterior of the house a soft yellow. Shutters were installed earlier this spring, and climbing roses were planted. There are plans for homemade window boxes this summer.A second bathroom would also be nice (although there is a functioning outhouse, and a couple of bathrooms in the RV that the couple bought to billet guests).“In my opinion, a house is never finished,” Ms. Gilbert said. “It’s always a work in progress.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More