For a client who had attempted two previous renovations in an Upper East Side townhouse that had retained its grand details from a 1937 remodel, the third time was a charm with the guidance of architect Anik Pearson. The townhouse received a complete overhaul of its infrastructure and service core to maximize performance and efficiency, with the layer of history reflected in its rooms and details carefully restored and preserved. Among the best of the renewal was the redesign of an existing rooftop garden to include sustainable elements like a grass roof, live-roof sedum and herb garden modules, a vegetable patch, a flower cutting garden, an orchard, a worm compost and a beehive for pollination.

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Manhattan’s Upper East Side is filled with enormous private mansions with configurations that you’d never guess from looking at their tidy facades, and the five-story, 20-room bow-fronted house at 207 East 71st Street, asking $13.5 million, is no exception. This 10,550-square-foot brick manse, built in 1982, is one of three in a row erected by friends who happened to be prominent real estate professionals. In this particular case, the already massive house includes a long-term lease on the first two floors of the adjacent mansion, allowing for a 50-foot-wide garden–one of the widest in Manhattan.

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Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has just listed the Park Avenue duplex that has been in his family since the 1960s for $32.5 million, the New York Post reports. Mnuchin bought the 12-room, 6,500 square-foot Upper East Side duplex from his aunt for $10.5 million in 2000, so even if the co-op in tony 740 Park Avenue doesn’t fetch the ask, he’ll pocket a tidy profit. The Rosario Candela-designed building is known for its wealthy residents who have included Rockefellers, Kochs and Bronfmans as well as being Mrs. Onassis’ childhood home. The former Goldman Sachs investment banker and Hollywood film producer was based in California before accepting a position with the Trump administration and has never claimed the Park Avenue home as his primary residence.

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Google Street View of the Holmes Towers

The federal government ranked three Upper East Side public housing buildings as some of the worst in the United States, the New York Post reported Monday. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave the Holmes Towers, the Isaacs Houses and Robbins Plaza just 25 points out of a maximum of 100 as a measure of quality following recent inspections. Out of the more than 3,800 scores counted by HUD last year, the three complexes tied for 13th worst in the country.

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Via LPC

Russia-born billionaire Roman Abramovich is moving ahead with his plan to construct a mega-mansion on the Upper East Side, the New York Post reported on Monday. Abramovich’s original proposal in 2016 called for an “18,255-square-foot mansion with a six-foot front yard, 30-foot backyard and pool in the cellar” across a combination of three townhouses on East 75th Street. Although the Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected that first plan, a proposal that kept similarly-styled facades and added a fourth property was approved soon after.

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Built in 1899, this Carnegie Hill townhouse at 174 East 95th Street has another history claim: It has been home to some serious and dedicated behind-the-camera luminaries. The four-story townhouse was for a time the address of controversial Oscar-winning stage and screen director Elia Kazan (“On the Waterfront,” “East of Eden” and many more). The 4,240-square-foot, four-bedroom home is currently owned by veteran TV journalist Cynthia McFadden, who is now the senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News. A fine example of an Upper East Side townhouse, the home has been renovated with care using fine fixtures and finishes while preserving its 19th century grandeur.

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Just last month, the New York Times interviewed novelist Jonathan Franzen on his move from the Upper East Side to a suburban street in Santa Cruz, California. After having a long-distance relationship with his “spouse equivalent,” writer Kathryn Chetkovich, he agreed to move to the west coast, saying he didn’t miss Yorkville, the “last middle-class neighborhood in Manhattan,” at all. And he’s now made that perfectly clear, unloading his three-bedroom co-op at 140 East 81st Street for $2 million, according to city records.

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Like many grand Manhattan properties in the neighborhood, this duplex penthouse atop a five-story townhouse at 57 East 73rd Street has an interesting past: It was once home to painter Marc Chagall (though another former Chagall residence nearby at 4 East 74th Street has attracted a bit more buzz in recent years, especially since Michael Jackson lived there in the 1990s). The 73rd Street townhouse has been divided into five condos since the artist’s time. Besides having painterly penthouse bragging rights, there’s a terrace that looks out over the Upper East Side neighborhood, which in turn is one block from Central Park and the Carlyle Hotel. The 1,350-square-foot home is asking $4.35 million–after several price chops from its original ask of $4.95 million in June.

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According to new documents, the next leg of the extension of the Q line to 125th Street that comprises the second phase of the Second Avenue Subway will be done in 2029, the Daily News reports. And that completion date only holds if work is begun on time, in mid-2019, according to the same document from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Federal Transit Administration. The expected phase two completion date is nearly a decade after Governor Andrew Cuomo opened the first section of the project in 2017. That 2029 date refers to the time all construction equipment has left the site; MTA officials hope to begin running trains through the tunnels, bringing vital service to Harlem, in 2027.

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The MTA has released updated ridership figures for 2017, giving an even better look at how the Second Avenue Subway is growing in popularity and impacting the Lexington Avenue line. By looking at the three comparative stations–96th Street, 86th, and 77th/72nd Streets–we can see that average weekday ridership on the 4,5,6 line has dropped 29.5, 29.2, and 23.6 percent respectively. More impressive is the fact that in 2017, the annual number of riders at the 96th Street station and 77th and 72nd Street stations were almost identical on both lines at roughly 8.5 million. And at 86th Street, the Q station hit 7.7 million riders, still impressive compared to the Lexington line’s $14 million considering there are two express trains there, too.

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