“This is how Marie Antoinette would have lived if she had money.”
These were the words the late Joan Rivers used in “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” to describe her opulent, classically adorned Upper East Side condo—the penthouse at 1 E. 62nd St., where Rivers also served as condo board president.
Like its owner, the penthouse was unquestionably a piece of work. “It is a palatial, magnificent, very French-looking apartment with very grand proportions,” says Dolly Lenz of Dolly Lenz Real Estate, who put the apartment on the market two years ago (and who has clients of a similar outrageous fashionista bent like, say, Sean Combs, a k a Diddy.) “It was as elegant and beautiful as she was,” Lenz deadpanned.
The penthouse contains floor-to-ceiling windows, wood-burning fireplaces and there is a parlor and mezzanine floor along with the second floor — and it is massive. “More than 5,000 square feet,” says Lenz.
When Rivers first put it on the market, the asking price was $29.5 million — but even that gargantuan sum of money might be too little in today’s overheated real estate atmosphere.
We hear that Lenz just repped the buyers in a similarly proportioned penthouse at 1136 Fifth Ave. (right next door to Bette Midler’s building) for $35 million — a Carnegie Hill record. When you consider that this apartment was more than 30 blocks north of Rivers and had to go through a huge bidding war (the original asking price was only $30 million), Melissa Rivers might take heed if she decides to put Rivers’ apartment on the market.