Suze Orman Will Be the Last Celebrity Living in ManhattanAs the year closes, we’re pondering our future in New York City. Here we sit, in our once unassuming Brooklyn coffee shop, which has recently begun being frequented by Keri Russell from Felicity and the guy from Basquiat. As we watch them talking shop over their laptops, we are, once again, getting the creeping feeling that soon, we’re going to be priced out of our neighborhood by celebrities. But can we really blame them? As Hilary Swank said recently, real-estate prices “have just skyrocketed!”; and even the celebrities themselves have been displaced Manhattan by the bankers. (Have you been to the West Village lately? Salman Rushdie and Julian Schnabel are like the last old hippies there. Other than that it’s like fucking Logan’s Run, all buff young dudes from UBS.) But according to Jim Cramer in yesterday’s Times, it’s the foreign buyers, those wielders of yuan and dirham, who are going to own New York City in the future. “The rest of us can live in Schenectady or Plattsburgh,” he wrote. “We can come here on the weekends and stay at a nice hotel in Astoria.” But not Suze Orman! This past weekend, Savings Diva Suze did not have nightmares about the credit-card bills she was going to receive after overextending herself on Christmas. This past weekend, the Observer tells us, she closed on an apartment at the Plaza. An apartment with “100-year-old mosaic tile patterns in the bathroom, walnut-bordered herringbone parquet in the living room” which she paid for in … cash. $3,610,886 and 34 cents, to be exact. There you have it. Suze Orman will outlast us all. Because only she has the Courage to be Rich.
The World of Tomorrow [NYT]
TV’s Finance Maharishi, Buys $3.6 M. Plaza Spread [NYO]
