They'll Take Manhattan, for a Million or More

August 2, 2005, New York Times

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Twenty years ago, in an article in Esquire magazine, Tom Wolfe wrote that the crème de la crème of "the international tribe of those who want to be where things are happening" is "desperate to live in what are known as the Good Buildings," cooperative apartment houses located on two narrow slivers of land on the East Side of Manhattan.
What makes an apartment house a Good Building "may have nothing to do with space, construction, or grandeur," Mr. Wolfe wrote, but more to do with certain attributes on the part of its residents connoting "bourgeois respectability" - namely, "decorous demeanor, dignified behavior, business and social connections, and sheer wealth." The average asking price for one of these coveted apartments, Mr. Wolfe breathlessly noted, was "almost exactly $4 million."
That was then. Today, the average sales price for an apartment in Manhattan - anywhere in Manhattan - has leaped over the million-dollar mark, and in the elite market, prices have soared into the $40 million-plus range.
In a gossipy new book, "The Sky's the Limit," the writer Steven Gaines (photo) reports that more than $300 million worth of condominiums were sold in the new Time Warner complex sight unseen while the building was still under construction. He adds that the south tower of that complex - decidedly not a Good Building in that a prospective buyer need not pass a board interview - "holds the record for the second-most-expensive apartment sold in New York, a 10,000-square-foot duplex on the seventy-fifth and seventy-sixth floor that was purchased for $42.5 million."
Like Mr. Wolfe, Mr. Gaines sifts Manhattan's real estate market for status details that might reveal residents' aspirations and pretensions. The book he has written seems meant to appeal to readers of The New York Observer's popular column Manhattan Transfers or The Los Angeles Times's Hot Property. It seems meant to appeal to happy homeowners' Schadenfreude and to less fortunate readers' envy and social voyeurism.
When Mr. Gaines sticks to reporting changes in New York's real estate landscape, the result is an entertaining chronicle of the current boom, which many have warned is a bubble about to burst. He seasons his narrative with lots of informative little tidbits: that the west side of Park Avenue is considered to be the better side of the street; that the United Nations Plaza once had a rule prohibiting residents from cooking in a wok; that one snooty building turned down a prospective buyer because he'd had the bad taste to apply for a J. C. Penney charge card.
The book is also peppered with lots of celebrity anecdotes: from the uproar caused in 1999 by the decision of the board of the once stuffy 820 Fifth Avenue to approve clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger to the agita caused at 55 Central Park West by Donna Karan's three-year renovation of her newly purchased apartment to reports that Steven Spielberg tried to renovate the view from his San Remo apartment by offering to pay another building to redo the dilapidated water tower on its roof.
Halfway through the volume, however, Mr. Gaines seems to lose focus on his subject. The narrative devolves into a succession of meandering profiles of well-known real estate brokers (including Linda Stein, Alice Mason, Edward Lee Cave, Dolly Lenz, Dottie Herman and Michael Shvo) and a series of long historical digressions about individual buildings like the Ansonia, digressions that are heavily indebted to earlier books like Elizabeth Hawes's charming "New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City" (1993).
To make matters worse, "The Sky's the Limit" is littered with small mistakes and outdated descriptions. For instance, Mr. Gaines writes of Manhattan's Upper West Side that "it's guerrilla theater on every block" and that there are "dramatic displays of wealth and poverty everywhere, including many homeless and emotionally ill people on the streets," a description that might have been apt a decade or two ago but that hardly applies to this willfully yuppified neighborhood today.
His description of Central Park West as a "six-lane boulevard" is misleading (it's six lanes wide only if one counts the rows of parked cars on either side of the street) and a picture caption incorrectly notes that Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons are inflated at "a small park across Eighty-second Street."
Such stumbles only contribute to the sense that "The Sky's the Limit" is less a full-fledged, carefully considered book than a hastily assembled collection of magazinelike stories about the Monopoly game of New York real estate.