People like celebrities (see: New York’s cover package from this week) and they like feeling connected to celebrities even more, when the chance arises. That’s why, as the Times’ Appraisal columnist points out today, they’re willing to pay a premium to live in an apartment previously inhabited by someone famous, even when the place itself isn’t all that great. (Unless you’re talking about Jon Corzine, whose place is up for sale in Jersey for far less than he paid for it.)
Mayor Bloomberg, on the other hand, is still a enticement. The mayor lived in a modest 600-square-foot apartment on the Upper East Side long past the days when he needed to economize. He painted the place himself. He hung a plastic chandelier. He “cooked hot dogs and hamburgers and burned French toast.” If they’d had X-Boxes and Seamless Web in the seventies, they probably would have figured prominently in his home life. “I got up in the morning and went to the bathroom, as I remember,” he told a reporter who asked about his domestic routine in those days.
Fine, so there are no wild Bloomberg stories. But that doesn’t mean Matthew Gales, who lives in the place at 66th and First Avenue, can’t capitalize on the name and get a little more than market value, right?
“That is not my apartment,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a telephone interview after examining pictures of the studio. “The kitchen was on the left.”
And kaboom, there goes Matthew Gales’s down payment on a condo in Boca. Hope you’re happy, Mike!
