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      in Theater

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

      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 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

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      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

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      in Theater

      Joel Grey, on Making a Space for Art and Dreams

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      The prolific actor, writer and photographer just turned 90, in a 1970s-style West Village loft that speaks to his many passions.Rain threatened on a recent Tuesday morning, and there was a chill in the air. But inside Joel Grey’s loft in Manhattan’s West Village, it was spring.Yellow roses — some doing a solo act, some in a clump — pink and yellow tulips, and pink and purple hyacinths sat in various containers on the round table in the open kitchen, on the glass coffee table, on a side table and on the skinny, rectangular dining table. Yet more multicolored roses, splayed atop a cabinet, were — how to put this nicely? — pushing up daisies.Mr. Grey, who won a Tony in 1967 and an Oscar in 1973 for his ineradicable portrayal of the feverishly rouged M.C. in the musical “Cabaret,” stood at the kitchen counter trying to arrange a new grouping of tulips. (He spends $50 a week on flowers at the local Whole Foods.) But these seemed to be an uncooperative bunch. “You kids are being difficult,” he told them, turning away for a minute to say hello to a visitor.Based on the evidence of an admittedly small sample — a reporter, a photographer, a publicist — the eternally pixieish Mr. Grey greets guests as though they were the winning lottery tickets that he thought he’d lost.But perhaps some of this ebullience was situational. “You know, it’s almost my 90th birthday,” he announced, clapping his hands like a delighted child, and leading the way to his office. There, on a hanger, was an orange sweatshirt with “1932” emblazoned in large black numbers on the front. (For the record, April 11 was the day.)“A darling friend gave a sweatshirt to Duane Michals for his 90th birthday, in February,” Mr. Grey said, referring to the photographer. “And I told her, ‘I want one too!’”The Tony- and Oscar-winning actor Joel Grey lives in a loft in the West Village, where he is surrounded by art and the souvenirs of his travels.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesJoel Grey, 90Occupation: Actor, writer, photographerNot by design: “My style is not eclectic, but rather serendipity. I’m truly Mr. Serendipity. Nothing I’ve bought was planned. Everything in here is about the moment.”He bought the apartment in the late 1990s, based on a floor plan.“I wanted to be in the Village. It was a whole new world to me,” said Mr. Grey, who had been living on the top floor of the Hotel Des Artistes on West 67th Street in an apartment that was put together, room by room, from former maids’ quarters, and had a skylight and a terrace. “But my brother told me, ‘You can’t live down there.’ At the time, it was very scrubby and scruffy on the streets near the West Side Highway. The place where the boats came in — the piers — it was all very undone.”But what was scrubby and scruffy when measured against proximity to the Hudson River? Mr. Grey watches it roll by from the built-in daybed where he drinks his morning coffee and reads his morning paper: “It’s my friend and my partner and my serenity.”He was further captivated by the “wet-clay” possibilities of a new-construction building. “It was about open space,” he said, “which I found so alluring, and about the mystery of how to make it a home. It was an adventure.”Mr. Grey’s well-traveled Vuitton trunks have been repurposed as side tables.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesA very personal adventure. There’s no interest here in showing off designers or making vignettes. Minimalist and neutral, with clean lines, columns and concrete floors, the apartment is part 1970s SoHo loft, part midcentury-modern design, with a cowhide rug on the floor of the bedroom, a cowhide-covered butterfly chair and a Jens Risom woven chair.“But I don’t think about periods,” Mr. Grey said. “I think about exclamation points.”Perhaps the exclamation points are the works of art: by, among others, Richard Tuttle, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Joan Miró, Sally Gall and Mr. Michals. Woodcarvings of antelope heads stand in a row on a windowsill. African sculptures dot the piano. There’s a galley wall in the primary bathroom.Mr. Grey is, of course, best known as an actor and director (of the acclaimed 2018 Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof”), and he continues to perform. He is part of the cast of “The Old Man,” a series scheduled to premiere on FX in mid-June. “I am not the old man,” he said, before anyone has a chance to ask.When Mr. Grey directed a Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof,” his assistant gave him an appropriately themed pincushion. Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesBut over the past dozen and a half years, Mr. Grey has also made a name for himself as a photographer. His work has been the focus of gallery shows and of several monographs. His most recent book of photographs, “The Flower Whisperer,” published in 2019, paid tribute to the nether regions of daisies, sunflowers, lilies, daffodils et al.Stuck inside during the pandemic, Mr. Grey began looking for — and photographing — the faces he saw in dried petals. They will be the subject of his next book. “Look up there. It’s a whole new world,” he said, pointing to a detail in the image of a dead blossom hanging on a partition in his office. “I see a bow tie.”Art and design have long been a part of his life. Growing up in Cleveland, the 8-year-old Joel fantasized about getting lost at the local museum and shut in overnight. Later, as work began taking him out of town, he invariably returned to New York with crafts. When, at the age of 19, he went to London to play the Palladium, he visited Positano, Italy, “and now I am looking at these monkey candlesticks I brought home,” he said, nodding toward the coffee table.A friend gave Mr. Grey a sweatshirt as a 90th-birthday present.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesShelves in Mr. Grey’s closet/dressing room display marionettes from Mexico; figures, bowls, vases and baskets from European ports; and, a little closer to home, collages made by his mother, Grace.The mother-son relationship, as chronicled in Mr. Grey’s 2016 memoir, “Master of Ceremonies,” was complicated. But it was because of Grace, he said, that even as a struggling actor, he cared deeply about his surroundings.“I always did up my apartments, even if I only spent a dollar and a quarter,” he said. “My mother and father taught me the importance of being professional and of making a place for myself. And my mother was all about making a space for art.”He has made the place and made the space. “It was all about, ‘Let’s figure this out,’” Mr. Grey said. “‘Let’s dream a little here.’ I’m a big believer in dreams.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      Where Jerry Zaks Goes to Escape the ‘Pure Pleasure’ of the Theater

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      The director of ‘The Music Man’ pays more attention to the furnishings onstage than to those at home. But that suits him fine.Jerry Zaks has never been much for turning an apartment into a home.He likes things clean, and he likes things comfortable. But beyond those basics, his interest kind of stalls out. An actor turned four-time Tony Award-winning director, he’s too wrapped up in second-act curtains to ponder living room curtains.“I think most of my places have looked like the dorm when I was in college, because I’ve been too busy working and getting the work done,” said Mr. Zaks, 75, who most recently shepherded the Broadway revival of “The Music Man,” starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and the musical adaptation of the film “Mrs. Doubtfire” (which resumes performances April 14 after a Covid-related hiatus). Among his two dozen other directing credits: “The House of Blue Leaves,” “Six Degrees of Separation,” the Steve Martin comedy “Meteor Shower” and the 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!”The celebrated Broadway director Jerry Zaks, whose current projects are “The Music Man” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” lives in a two-bedroom apartment  on the Upper West Side. Photographs, ephemera and Hirschfeld caricatures, including one of himself, hang in his kitchen.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“When I’m going home,” he continued, “I’m not escaping from anything except pure pleasure, which is the theater or my rehearsal room.”Jerry Zaks, 75Occupation: DirectorMaking the scene: “I’ve never paid a lot of attention to how my apartment looks. I’ve paid more attention to the set design of my show. I love participating in the creation of the world that is going to house the show I’m doing.”Since moving to New York in 1969 after graduate school, Mr. Zaks has lived uptown and down, in hovels and in storied buildings like the El Dorado, where the apartment he shared with his wife, the actress Jill Rose, and two daughters overlooked Central Park and was big enough that he could chalk up a constitutional — he is an obsessive walker — simply by striding from one end of the space to the other.Mr. Zaks has a unique copy of “Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports.” It contains a meticulously crafted gag entry written by a friend about one Jerry Zaks, “after Tiger Woods, the most exciting amateur golfer of the 1990s…”Katherine Marks for The New York TimesBut time marches on, and with the dissolution of his marriage, Mr. Zaks did, too. He moved to one rental near the El Dorado, then another, to stay in proximity to his children, now adults. In 2008, he found a more permanent perch, in the shape of a two-bedroom co-op with prewar details, on West End Avenue.At the time, Mr. Zaks was in Los Angeles directing episodic television, and his then girlfriend had taken up the apartment search, sending him photos and descriptions of appealing prospects.“When I came back to New York, I went once and took a look, and said, ‘Let’s do it,’” recalled Mr. Zaks, who commented very favorably on a renovation by the seller that combined the kitchen and dining room into one warm, open space.That same girlfriend helped Mr. Zaks outfit the apartment. “On stage, I want to know how I get in and out of the living room. I want to know how the couch relates to the table,” he said. “But for my own apartment, I didn’t really get involved. She would show me pictures, and I would say, ‘This looks good.’”A caramel-colored leather sofa and easy chair looked good to Mr. Zaks. So did an Arts-and-Crafts sideboard, a free-standing bookcase of similar style and a rectangular wood dining table.Among his favorite possessions: a travel bar set once owned by Zero Mostel.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“Some of the earliest work on ‘Hello, Dolly!,’ ‘Meteor Shower,’ ‘The Music Man’ and ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ was done around that table,” he said. “I don’t need an office. I just need a good kitchen table.”Mr. Zaks would like to be a minimalist, but not quite yet. In a corner of the kitchen, which is painted a nice shade of coral, a tall stack of scripts and research material related to “The Music Man” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” seems to be awaiting further instructions. “I haven’t thrown them out yet because I can’t,” he said.Covering the walls are framed notes and letters of appreciation from colleagues like Neil Simon and Harold Prince (“I loved him because he was the last person in show business to call me ‘kid,’” Mr. Zaks said). There are several Al Hirschfeld caricatures, including one of Mr. Zaks in 1980, when he appeared on Broadway in the musical revue “Tintypes,” as well as ephemera like a two-page spread from the script of Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker.” (The source material for “Hello, Dolly!,” it was a gift from the administrators of the playwright’s estate when Mr. Zaks’s “Dolly” revival opened.)The cache of show posters — “my little shrine to myself” — represents Mr. Zaks both as performer (fun fact: he was a replacement Kenickie in the original production of “Grease”) and director. “This is a partial display including my greatest successes and, well, let’s put it this way: You’ve got hits and you’ve got misses,” he said. “Hits are better, but you’d be a fool not to remember the misses, because you work just as hard on them.”All pretty impressive, but nothing has quite the resonance of a photograph of a 20-something Jerry Zaks posing with his parents and Zero Mostel. Mr. Zaks was playing Motel the tailor in a tent-theater summer tour of “Fiddler on the Roof”; Mr. Mostel was reprising his Tony-winning performance as Tevye, while taking on an additional role: rumbustious mentor to his young castmate.Meet Mr. Zaks’s friends Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony and George. Katherine Marks for The New York Times“When I was a junior at Dartmouth and declared I was going to be an actor, my parents were very disappointed — a waste of an Ivy League education and all that,” Mr. Zaks said. “They were afraid for me. They were Holocaust survivors, and there was a Nazi around every corner.”But of course, they came to see their son in action, and afterward, went backstage to meet Mr. Mostel. “For 20 minutes, they spoke Yiddish to Zero, tummeling back and forth,” he recalled. “And finally my father asked, ‘Is my son going to be all right in this farkakte business?’ And Zero answered, ‘He’s going to be more than all right.’ And then we took the picture.”“That was the beginning of my parents accepting what I was committed to,” added Mr. Zaks, who counts among his favorite opening-night gifts a travel cocktail bar set that once belonged to Mr. Mostel.A while back, he was returning from a favorite neighborhood spot, Silver Moon Bakery, when he ran into a fellow co-op resident, Melissa Gooding, who was out walking her dog. “She moved in shortly after I did, but we didn’t get to know each other closely until last year,” Mr. Zaks said.He now divides his time between their two apartments. On the mantel in Ms. Gooding’s apartment are Mr. Zaks’s four Tony statuettes, along with a Mr. Abbott award, a tribute named for the legendary man of the theater, George Abbott. On a wall in the hall is a framed photo snapped by the stage doorman at the Winter Garden Theatre, home of “The Music Man”: Mr. Zaks huddling with Ms. Foster and Mr. Jackman at the end of a performance.“It’s hard to talk about without getting emotional,” he said. “This is my everything.”“The relationship I have with my actors is the most precious thing I have outside of family,” he continued, “and it’s encapsulated in this one image.”Mr. Jackman and Ms. Foster had the photo blown up as a gift for Mr. Zaks. He may not care much about décor, but he knows what makes him feel at home.For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      Theater 80 in New York City Could Become Another Pandemic Casualty

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      Battered by a coronavirus lockdown and conflict over a loan, Theater 80 could become another New York City casualty of the pandemic.There are fewer and fewer places left in New York City where you can walk through a door and feel transported back in time. Among them is 80 St. Marks Place, a Prohibition-era speakeasy converted into an Off Broadway theater in the early 1960s.Inside the front door there are still hooks embedded in the brick where steel plates were once hung to buy time during police raids. The lobby walls are covered with framed, autographed photos from dozens of famous actors, including Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy.A narrow hallway connects the theater lobby with William Barnacle Tavern, where you can still get absinthe from a bar that has been in place since the 1920s. The performance space itself, Theater 80, is intimate, with a 199-seat capacity. You can hear someone speaking at a normal volume from anywhere in the room.The space of William Barnacle Tavern, which is connected to the theater, was once a Prohibition-era speakeasy.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesBut like so many of the city’s treasures, the theater, the tavern and the Museum of the American Gangster, on the second floor, are all facing extinction because of the pandemic.Lorcan and Genie Otway, who own the connected buildings at 78 and 80 St. Marks Place and live in an apartment upstairs, are now scrambling to prevent a mortgage investor from auctioning them off.“The shutdown offered us no protection from creditors, which I think is unconscionable,” Lorcan Otway said during a recent tour of the building and its underground tunnels, through which contraband was smuggled during the 1920s and ’30s.Otway, whose father bought the buildings in 1964, said that the theater, museum and tavern were in good financial health until March 2020, when they were shuttered by a state mandate that affected virtually all corners of the performance and service industries. Shortly before then, he had taken out a $6.1 million mortgage against the properties to settle an inheritance dispute, pay legal fees and finance needed renovations.With the pandemic lockdown and a precipitous decline in revenue, that loan went into default and was purchased by Maverick Real Estate Partners about a year ago. The firm, according to court documents, has closed over 130 distressed debt transactions, with a total value of over $300 million.The lobby walls are covered with framed, autographed photos from dozens of famous actors.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesOtway, who dug out the theater space with his father when he was 9 and had turned down numerous offers by developers over the years, said that he had hired an attorney to renegotiate the payment terms, but the original lender stopped returning his phone calls and sold the debt to Maverick without his knowledge.Maverick, Otway said, then raised the interest rate to 24 percent, from 10 percent, bringing the roughly $6 million debt to about $8 million. The company did not respond to messages asking for a comment.Joe John Battista, the artistic director of the 13th Street Repertory Theater, is familiar with a conflict like this. His company was recently evicted from the space it has called home since 1972 after a majority of the building’s shareholders locked it out.“Real estate is real estate, but this is the arts,” Battista said. “There ought to be some special attention paid when the city stands to lose a piece of cultural history like this.”Theater 80 hosted plays throughout the 1960s, including the pre-Broadway run of the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” From 1970 until Otway’s father died in 1994, the space was used to screen movies; for a time, it was New York City’s longest continuously running house devoted exclusively to revival films.City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and remembered seeing Shakespeare at Theater 80 when she was a teenager. “This is a heartbreaking story,” she said, adding that the complexities of running even the smallest business in New York now require a team of experts.“This is a huge advantage to the larger developers, the real estate companies, the financial institutions that can both take on this cost and hire a team to manage it,” Rivera said. “And the detriment is, not just to the small landlords and the deterioration of assets to people of otherwise moderate means, but also to the community at large who lose the landlords who are interested in providing beneficial things.”The 199-seat theater is so intimate, you can hear someone speaking from anywhere in the room.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesArthur Z. Schwartz, a lawyer with a reputation for representing underdog clients, said that there needs to be some type of legislative change to rein in distressed mortgage purchasing.“Beside the fact that you have a predatory lender who set this up so there was basically no way he would ever be able to make the payments, then shift it from being a mortgage to being some kind of commercial paper,” Schwartz said. “That lets you get around a lot of the stuff we have these days protecting mortgagees because of Covid.”John McDonagh, an old friend of Otway’s, has scheduled a benefit performance of his show “Off the Meter,” a comedic monologue about his decades of driving a yellow cab in New York, with all the profits benefiting Theater 80.“I’m just trying to help save a theater that Covid, gentrification and big bankers are trying to take,” said McDonagh, whose show runs Jan. 21-23 as part of Origin Theatre Company’s 1st Irish Festival.“St. Marks Place without Theater 80 would be like Houston Street without Katz’s Deli,” McDonagh said. “It would always feel like something was missing from the East Village.” More