Gotham Real Estate

Big Deals

West Village
130 Barrow Street
2-bed, 21/2-bath, 1,200-square-foot condo. Ask: $899,000. Sell: $865,000. Charges and taxes: $1,000. Seven weeks on market.

If only these penthouse walls could talk. The seller, a guitarist who heads his own record company, just sold his rock-star pad to an executive at a major book-publishing house. "He bought it for his girlfriend," says Charles H. Greenthal's Lew Lydiard, who declines to add whether said executive is married. The building, which used to house a Hertz car-rental office, has a renovated lobby and roof deck. But Lydiard says the wall-to-wall river views illuminating the first and second floors really closed the deal.
JOY ARMSTRONG

Turtle Bay
400 East 59th Street
500-square-foot co-op studio. Ask: $200,000. Sell: $200,000. Maintenance: $500. Two weeks on market.

Exhausted after looking at "millions of studios" with an executive from Boston, William B. May's Ellen Morgan suggested that the two of them wrap up an afternoon of searching at Billy's, a neighborhood bar. "At 11 that night, I got a call," says Morgan. "She was still at Billy's. She said, 'You have to find me an apartment near this bar, so I can come back!' " Morgan found her the perfect place, but was worried the deal might founder after September 11. She didn't need to: "The client called me a few days after the disaster," she recalls. "She said, 'Is Billy's still standing? Then I'm coming!' "
EMILY GITTER

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